Not As We Were
by Alinyaalethia
Summary: It was never going to be easy to resume the old way of life in the aftermath of the First World War. The Blythes, Fords and Merediths of Glen St. Mary rebuilt their worlds each in their own way. Returning to the characters of O Silver Moon, this is an exploration of the reconstruction of part of that world.
1. Chapter 1

**This story picks up the thread of my writing on Carl and Persis, not quite where _O Silver Moon_ came to an end, but resuming the story some years ahead. It's a story I've been promising some of you for a while. With luck it's been worth waiting for.**

 **As ever the characters belong to L. M. Montgomery and those that do not are inspired by her.**

* * *

 _Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;_

 _There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;_

 _Some could, some could not, shake off misery:_

 _The Sinister Spirit sneered: 'It had to be!'_

 _And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, 'Why?'_

-'And there was great calm' Thomas Hardy

* * *

'Tell me about the house we are going to,' says Carl as the train rattles its way from Southampton to Oxford. When they first made arrangements to move to the university it had seemed far off and distant, something that would not come to pass for many years. There had been no reason for Carl to try and conjure a picture -clear or otherwise -of the place they were going to or the life they would build there. Now, after weeks of traveling from Canada, the details firmly in place, and the reality of what they are doing before him, his curiosity is piqued.

'You're under the funny impression I've seen it,' says Persis mildly.

'Haven't you though?'

'Don't you think I'd have written to tell you I was going halfway 'round the world to England to go traipsing all over North Oxford for a house?'

'Well…'

'Here,' says Persis relenting, 'there's an account of it in Nina's letter if you want to read it. _She's_ the one who did all the rushing about in the time she didn't have.'

'Bit of a risk, wasn't it?' says Carl impishly, 'trusting her with something like that?' He doesn't mean it; he has always liked the musically minded Nina, long-time friend of Persis, an Persis knows as much.

'I've trusted her with more important things before now,' she says and parts with the letter. Carl takes it, turns it sideways -the better to read with one good eye -and settles back in his seat to peruse the contents.

 _I knew it was right for you when I saw the yew trees,_ writes Nina of the house in Norham Gardens. _I know those were really a thing you and I shared, but I can't picture you drawing under anything but yew trees, and I like to think that in this academic world of sciences and spires you are moving into there will still be room for me to come visit when I'm not having to die of consumption, or love, or something equally awful at Covent Garden. So even though the yew trees are really ours, yours and mine and Ken's, as soon as I saw the garden was full of them, I knew the house would be right._

 _The other point in its favour was the name, 'Silver Moon.' I never have found out what it was about my singing that aria of Rusalka's that could make moonlight out of your eyes, but I let you twist my arm into singing it at your wedding, so suppose it matters, and don't quite dare ask why._

 _It isn't a big house by a long way, but there is a south-facing front room, and a sitting room with a fire, and a kitchen big enough to move around in –certainly big enough to go through the fussy process that is making yew berry tartlets in –with a doorframe rather than a door but opposite the front room so as to catch the excess sunlight. (On the days when that's not possible –and there_ _will_ _be days like that, I can promise you – it's been painted a soft yellow colour that will make even the electric look warm.)_

 _The rest I'll leave you to discover, if only for the sake of the postage, but you must promise to write and tell me how I've done. In the meantime dream a spire for me –goodness knows you'll have enough of them to spare._

 _Love and best wishes,_

 _Nina_

'There aren't any spires though,' says Carl not without confusion, looking from Nina's letter to the view out the window of the Oxford station as the train settles into its platform. He wonders for a moment if it is simply that the spires in question are too far to his right, if he were to twist far enough round in his seat they might not loom into view as lampposts have been known to do before now. Ever so gently Persis disabuses him of this notion.

'You won't see them from here,' she says, 'you want to climb St. Michael's tower, or something else equally high, for that.'

'How do you know?' Carl wants to know, 'don't tell me you've travelled here too?' By then his focus has shifted from the window to a case lodged in the overhead rack of the compartment they are sitting in.

'It was years ago,' says Persis, 'before the war. Ken will remember it better; we were both children at the time. We were halfway between home and somewhere else so stopped a day at Oxford. I can't remember what building we scaled then to see the spires, only that that was how we discovered mum didn't have a taste for heights.'

'It's a shorter list, isn't it,' says Carl, scoring a victory against the case he's been wrestling with, 'to ask where you _haven't_ travelled for the sake of your father's books.'

'Very probably. Here, let me be useful,' and threading her arm through his, she begins to navigate the way out of the train and through the station.

The house is much as Nina describes it, small and improbably put together, with one side taller than the other in a way that suggests a church steeple. There is no front garden; like so many English houses is pressed up against the pavement. There is, however, something of a yard round the back, and in it, as Nina said there would be, are yew trees. After so many noble poplars and stately willows the yew trees that whisper of Sussex Avenue and Toronto are like coming home.

There is a flash of net curtain from the neighbouring house –a rambling Victorian affair with windows buried in tracery –and then a young woman is coming down the walk calling out to them in a voice that would do well as a BBC continuity announcer's, were it not so soft, 'you must be the people from Canada I was told to expect. I've been watching for you to give you the key.'

She is a slight, even nondescript person, with hair in a colour that best described as field-mouse, and that seems to fade into the tweed of her clothing. She would be captured best, Persis thinks, by the muted and fleeting aspect of water-colour.

'You will be the Miss Glover we were told to look for then' says Persis.

'Oh no,' says the woman purporting to be someone other than Miss Glover, 'I haven't been Miss Glover to anyone since college.' She shivers a little and rubs at her arms through the tweed of her coat. Then she smiles, and though it is the slightest hint of a smile it betrays something about her that is almost beautiful. 'I've even cured the vicar of calling me that,' she tells them, and laughs. The laugher resolves the question of her beauty; it is light and bright as a full peal of bells at a wedding.

'People who know me,' she goes on, 'have always called me Mia for everyday –except mother; I'm always Amelia to mother.' A cloud passes over her forehead and then vanishes as she brightens again. 'I do hope,' she says, 'you'll call me Mia too. I like you already; it would be so nice if we _could_ get to know one another.'

'It would be a pretty poor beginning,' says Carl comfortably, 'if we had resolved to alienate our nearest neighbours.'

'Oh I'm glad,' says Mia, her gloved hands extended towards them both in greeting and to part with the keys to the house. 'Here, the long slim key is the front door, and that fat tarnished one undoes the door at the back…I think the small gold one is for the windows in the sitting room, but you'll have to try it and see. There's milk, bread, cheese and things in the kitchen, and a cut of lamb from the butcher. I do hope that's all right, only it seemed easier than expecting you to find your way to the shops your first day in a strange place. It's what I'd want done if it were _me_ but mother seemed to think I was interfering.'

'It was very thoughtful of you,' says Persis, pressing Mia's hand and accepting the keys.

'We've been travelling what feels ages and I don't suppose I'll have the energy to face the city centre until at least tomorrow. Come in, won't you, and have tea or something? As a thank-you?'

'Yes, do,' says Carl, 'I expect we can look out the tea things without too much trouble.'

'No, no, I couldn't,'' says Mia, 'not when you're still in the throes of unpacking and putting things to rights. Travelling has a way of relocating the most ordinary things to extraordinary places. China gets wrapped up in down quilts for safekeeping, books knock elbows with jumpers, and things like that. I remember from college life. Come back with me, won't you? Mother's lying down and I think has actually fallen asleep, so it's quite all right. There's no chance of you meeting her.'

'Is she so dreadful,' asks Carl in spite of himself.

'The thing to understand about mother,' says Mia with a flash of sharp humour that penetrates and ennobles what are otherwise unremarkable hazel eyes, 'is that she has Opinions. She has them on everything and everyone and she doesn't mind who hears them.'

It is not long before they are all three established in the Glover sitting room, Mia looking especially faded and dwarfed by the ungainly furniture. Persis might render Mia in watercolour, but nothing but oils and perhaps a bold charcoal would suit to capture the sprawling mass of the Glover house. Mia fusses over a tea service of Royal Albert design, and while straining China tea three ways, parts unconcernedly with college gossip, although by her own admission she has not seen the inside of an Oxford college since the war ended seven years ago.

'Mother collects students,' Mia says by way of explanation, 'she's forever having them round to tea, and sometimes taking the suitable ones in as lodgers.'

As if to reinforce the truth of this a terrific noise strikes up overhead, reminiscent of a rabbit being slaughtered by a cat. On this basis Persis and Carl both ignore it, having had their share of significantly worse sounds. Mia flinches, causes the tea to overrun both strainer and the teacup under her current administration, and says, 'I'll take that one, it's all right.'

Still with apology Mia says, 'That's Laurence Hodges,' a hint of regret in her voice. 'He's our current lodger and you mustn't take him as an accurate sample of our music generally. I don't think mother would have agreed to have him on at the house in the first place if she had realised he was an aspiring violinist.'

'Is that what he's doing?' asks Carl, who would probably not otherwise have guessed.

'Lamentably,' says Mia with a return of that sharp dry humour that puts such colour into her eyes.

'He plays all hours of the day and night. We're crossing our fingers, mother and I, that St. Edmund's will give him a room for his honours year. If they will then someone else can find out if he ever does succeed at playing.' She passes round a plate of Victoria biscuits and shakes her head. 'I shouldn't be hard on him really, he's a perfectly lovely young man in every other respect. Though I do worry…'

There comes over the wail of the music the thumping of something heavy and wooden against the floor.

'Oh dear, he _has_ woken her,' says Mia.

'We'd better let you get on then,' says Persis. Mia begins to object but Persis says, 'No really, don't worry about the tea; I haven't quite lost the idea that accepting a second cup from a stranger is bad manners anyway. It always was in India.'

'Was it?'

'It was. It was a signal to leave. Now look, you've done more than your share –you must come round to us next time and let us redress the tea economy. Will you?'

Mia promises she will, but not a day before they have settled into Oxford life. Then she leads them through the labyrinth of overgrown furniture to the front door, before disappearing into the chaos of wailing violins and wooden canes in the upper part of the house.

* * *

At Silver Moon Carl and Persis wander through the house, discovering its angles and corners as they strip the furniture of dust covers. The stairs up to the first floor are perhaps the most striking feature, steeply sloped, full of sharp turns and inexplicably, devoid of a handrail. At their base is a fire-screen that has been shunted ineffectively out of the way, jutting out just enough to trip up an unsuspecting passer-by. Between them, Persis and Carl relocate it so that it shelters the empty fireplace, and nerve themselves to start unpacking.

As they do so they find the veracity of Mia's earlier remembrances of packing and unpacking to be born out. Nestled among the linen and quilts is a framed drawing of a young Stuart Ross on his older brother's bicycle. A passle of letters, still with their envelopes and smelling faintly of hyacinths and summer, surfaces in Carl's copy of _To Build a Fire_. _Where Angels Fear to Tread_ exposes a photo of a younger Carl, still with both his eyes and his arms wrapped around what looks like nothing so much as a young wolf. The picture has been doing duty as a bookmark.

'Who took this?' asks Persis, extricating the photo and holding it out to Carl, who has been until that moment mired in sorting so many books into what –to him –passes for order. He takes the picture, and seems to study it, turning it over, and peering at the inscription as if fishing for details.

'Journalist fellow took it, I think,' says Carl, passing a hand over his eyes. 'You know, one of those people who wasn't a soldier but had wound up overseas so that someone could tell the newspapers back home what to print. Seemed to feel our bringing dogs into that mess would make for a good story, and was nice enough to send a copy of the picture back to me once he'd had it developed. Or something like that. The edges are blurry.'

The edges of the photo are no such thing. A bit worn, perhaps, from their protracted residence in the world of E.M. Forster, but the details they capture, the mud and the chain of the fence, those things are clear enough. Of Lucy, the German Shepherd in his arms there is a stream of what feels infinite memories; his teaching her to take and carry messages; her bounding up to meet him when he visited the kennel; the weight of her head on his shoulder as they read over the news from Sussex Ave; Lucy bounding towards him like a meteor as she made her mad bid to save his life. It is the specifics of this image though, the occasion that warranted its existence that is hazy.

'Must have been spring,' Carl says, setting the picture for safekeeping on a nearby windowsill. 'There's fireweed coming through the mud.'

A set of a dozen cast-iron and enamelled tea bowls comes to light less improbably ensconced in so many tea towels.

'They did survive,' says Persis, her relief palpable.

'You didn't really think they wouldn't?' Carl asks as he coaxes the lid off of the chest containing crockery altogether more practical if less well-loved.

'It was the easier thing to worry about,' says Persis as she stacks the teabowls in twos atop the creamy kitchen counter. She is awash in the last of that afternoon's sunlight, so that even worn out with travelling she looks to Carl every bit as golden and full of moonlight and prose as the young woman he fell in love with. She had been more inclined to reality than dreaming even then, he remembers, and then it had made sense because to dream one's way through a war was a terrible and dangerous thing. It would be pleasant though, Carl thinks, now that the world is beginning to reassemble itself, to put back together all the pieces that fell apart in the fight for goodness, to learn what she was like when dreaming.

'Beginnings are always difficult,' Carl offers, abandoning the pots and pans if favour of slipping his arms around her, 'but I think we could be at home here. Not because of the people or the name of the house or even the yew tress but…'he grows thoughtful, reaching for words that will articulate and justify his certainty.

'Of course we'll be at home here,' says Persis, turning to look at him and finding his eyes bright with anticipation.

'I could be at home wherever you were. You are home to me.'

Away in the distance one of the college bells chimes the hour, then continues to call out an invitation to evensong. There will be music and candles, and some other evening, Carl thinks, they will make time for the excursion. It is enough tonight to put the finishing touches on the house called Silver Moon, to lay down the roots that will make it theirs.


	2. Chapter 2

**Thank you for such encouraging reviews. I hadn't expected so much warmth for a story that must feel at such a remove from the world of the books. It means a lot that you've followed story and characters with me.**

* * *

 _Forgive me not writing sooner,_ begins Persis's letter to Nina once she has a free moment to write, _We haven't stopped_ _doing_ _since we arrived Monday last. It ought to go without saying that you've exceeded yourself, not least because I suspect you of knowing as much, but I wanted to tell you so anyway. We're settled now, or almost. Everything has been taken out of boxes and trunks and given a proper place, so all is in order for that visit you are threatening._

 _The only irritant is a lodger of Mia next door (the Miss Glover you left the key with). He is a Mr. Hodges and insists on practicing the violin, or trying to. Our own 'kleine Nacht Muisk' Carl calls it, though it is not half as good as the music you spoiled me with when we both lived on Sussex Avenue. I have become newly sympathetic to Aunt Anne in her stories about St. John's Boarding House and its cats, because the playing that comes out of that upstairs bedsit sounds more like one of those felines than any instrument I've ever heard. Otherwise, he is quite a reasonable human being, who studies Greats at St. Edmund's. Unluckily none of us, not Carl, or myself, Mia or her mother, knows much in the way of Greats beyond the requisite schoolroom Latin, and this seems to cause him undue distress, chiefly I think because it means we have nothing meaningful to contribute on the subjects such as the writings of Suetonius or the significance of Seneca's_ _Apocolocyntosis_ _(sp?)._

 _But don't take any of this on hearsay, come down yourself the next chance you have and see how we've taken to Oxford. Already it feels like home, and I am glad we took the risk in coming here. Mostly though, I want to hear how are you getting on with the Marschallin. I miss those late evenings when we sat up dissecting your music. Rather, you did the dissecting; it made about as much sense to me as Mr. Hodges' treatises on Greats. But by all accounts it would seem Strauss is writing specially for you –am I right?_

'You're smiling,' says a voice from the doorway to Nina's dressing room, 'don't suppose you'll tell me the reason, will you?'

'Stuart!' says Nina, whirling round to the open door, 'Stuart Ross, what on earth are you doing here? _How_ are you here?'

'I wrangled it,' says Stuart glibly.

'No, don't say that,' Nina almost groans, wringing hands still holding hairbrush and hairpins, 'my heart sinks when you say things like that. Whenever Ken said he'd 'wrangled' something, it invariably meant he'd done something he shouldn't; played truant, climbed into some window he should have kept out of, broken someone's heart, all that sort of thing.'

Any and all of these things might be true, Nina thinks as she takes in the spectacle of Stuart leaning against the doorframe, his hand high over his head, ballasting the rest of him. He is still all golden hair, ruddy complexion and eyes that cannot help laughing and he is trying terribly hard to look grown-up. He might even convince someone else. To Nina he is as wide-eyed and boyish as the giddy cherub who worshipped soldiers as heroes and who she first taught to sing.

'It's all right,' says Stuart soothingly, 'it's all perfectly legal. I told the conservatory I was coming to hear you so I could learn about high notes and technique.'

'Stuart really,' says Nina again, trying not to laugh. Instead she tosses her head sending waves of rose-gold hair tumbling own over her shoulders, a gesture Stuart recognises and registers at once as conveying amusement, exasperation and the merest _touch_ of the infamous standoffishness tenors and basses the world over associate with Nina.

'What? It's true, isn't it?'

'Not a bit,' says Nina comfortably, resuming the task of pinning up her hair. 'If you want to learn about high notes you want to listen to the soprano who sings Sophie, not the Marschallin.'

'Really? Then what are you doing singing the Marschallin?' By now Stuart has abandoned the doorway and is generally making a nuisance of himself around the dressing room, picking things up, setting them down again, riffling through music Nina has made the mistake of leaving out in the open.

'She's the character everyone cares about,' says Nina, relaxing her shoulders and finally allowing herself to laugh.

'I see –how very like a soprano –and how unlike you Nina.'

'Not really,' says Nina, 'I'm more of a performer than you're giving me credit for.'

'I'll take your word for it,' says Stuart, coming and resting his elbows on the back of her chair, or trying to. He has barely settled himself to his comfort when the chair is neatly and efficiently swept from under him. He stumbles and is picking himself up off the floor when Nina manages to ask, 'Why are you making a study of high notes anyway? It's not technique you want, it's precision. You'd be far better off practicing, not gadding about for an evening's entertainment dressed up as an errand.'

Stuart appears to consider this, then shrugs. 'They agreed, didn't they? So someone thought it was a good idea.' Safely ensconced in the alcove between vanity and wall, Stuart picks up a pin-box and turns it between his fingers, brightening considerably as he does so. 'Say' he says with his playfulness of old and eyes brighter and bluer than ever, 'if they're doing it all wrong, why don't you take over from them?'

'What and teach you? Stuart, in what time, even supposing I was willing -and I'm not -to go to war with the Royal Conservatory in Toronto over your voice? They know what they're about. Besides, would you listen to me any more than you do to them?'

'Look,' Stuart says, dodging the question from this position of safety, 'are you going to tell me what's pleased you or not?'

'Here,' says Nina, handing him Persis's letter, 'it can occupy you while I finish getting ready for a performance you're supposed to be studying. Read that and tell me how long you think Persis and Carl have been in Oxford.'

'Dunno,' Stuart says, scanning it, 'a month? Two maybe?'

'A week,' says Nina, 'and already Persis sounds as if she's lived there all her life. We're never getting them back, you know. It will be flying terms and long vacs forever. One day I'm going to give up battling time completely and do what the Marschallin threatens to do and stop all the clocks.'

'Whatever for?' asks Stuart, blinking at her confusedly over the letter postmarked to Oxford.

'What do you think? Time goes far too quickly without you speeding it up for me with all your misplaced guessing. Someday it will matter.'

'Nonsense,' says Stuart, 'you shall always be pretty.' Cautiously he circles the room until he has regained his place behind her chair. He extends a hand, intending to help her with what errant strands of gold remain to be secured with pins, but Nina swats it away.

'Careful you,' she says, reclaiming the letter and driving him back to his corner of the vanity with it, 'or I shall have to start calling you my Rosenkavalier.'

'There are worse things I might be called,' Stuart says impishly as he leans on the edge of the vanity.

'Dear boy,' ays Nina with sincerity. 'Even then you know, time and sense would catch you up, incredible as that is to believe.' Then lightly and easily, 'Go on, find out where it is you're supposed to be sitting and _sit_. And if you're meant to be learning about technique for singing at the top, for goodness' sake _listen_ , won't you?'

'Of course, teacher,' says Stuart grinning at her. ' _In boco al lupo_ ,' and he kisses her cheek.

' _Crepi il lupo,_ ' says Nina without really thinking, 'and all the rest of it. Now go you rascal, before you're too late to be seated.'

'All right,' Stuart says, 'all right. You might be the littlest bit glad to see me though.'

'I am,' Nina assures him, favouring him with the slightest of smiles, 'I am. I'll be ever so much more glad when I'm not harried and trying to prepare to make an audience weep. Go sit; I'll wait for you afterwards. We can do supper, I shall be glad to eat then, you know I never do before I sing. You can take my music to pieces for me and save me the trouble as you tell me all about good technique for high notes. Now –'

'I'm going,' says Stuart, and bowing to her, he vanishes down the labyrinthine corridors of Covent Garden's backstage.


	3. Chapter 3

_With thanks as ever for reading and/or reviewing this story. Both are greatly appreciated._

* * *

The second Sunday they are in Oxford finds Persis retracing her steps along the High to the church of St. Mary Magdalene. At the door she is met by a tall silvery-haired man with laughing green eyes that glow with warmth and humour. He almost reminds her of her father, except that he is more immediately present than Owen Ford as he touches Persis's elbow lightly and says, 'You're Mia's friend, aren't you? The one living the next house along to hers? Something to do with one of the colleges, I think she said.'

'Yes, that's right, with Keble.'

'Keble? Good hymn-writer Keble. Gave us 'Blest are the Pure in Heart.' Excellent hymn. I take it Mia couldn't come?'

'No, her mother's ill –a cold or 'flu or something –and she couldn't get away.'

'You say that,' says the stranger, 'as if you've developed the same theory I have about Mrs. Glover's illnesses. It's a good theory, by the way, I've tested it. Inquired after her health, you know, made sure she was quite well, and asked if she couldn't join on the refreshments committee. You should have seen how quickly one of her turns took her.' He chuckles pleased with his joke, in a way that invites conspiracy.

'Now, as you can't possibly sit alone in a strange church and Mia's a special pet of mine, come and keep me company, won't you? I make a habit of being good to friends of Mia's. Besides, this way I can teach you the choreography.'

Persis lets him take her arm and navigate for them through the throng of people gathered at the entrance to talk with the ushers. The stranger negotiates this space deftly, nodding to half-a-dozen people as they go, and then they are in the church proper, and the air is full of that smell of incense, damp stone and the must of old books that marks it out as a church. It is not until they are seated in a pew towards the back and building up pyramids of prayer books, orders of service and the _English Hymnal_ that the man with the laughing green eyes introduces himself as Father Cameron.

'Not a priest now, you know,' he says almost apologetically. 'Well, not an acting one. Sometimes I take the sermon or act as deacon when the vicar needs another pair of hands. _Very_ occasionally I may take a whole service. I made the mistake, you know,' says Father Cameron confidentially, 'of saying I was happy to help when I first came here. A word of warning, my dear, _never_ say that in an Anglican church unless you want the vicar to come calling. I hadn't been in Oxford a fortnight before the word had got out and there was Father Martin at the door asking how I felt about helping with the services. Naturally I felt compelled to say I would.' He does not sound in the least sorry about this fact. To judge by the way his eyes dance, Persis is inclined to conclude he rather likes being involved. Before she can says as much, Father Cameron is reminiscing again.

'Now, let me think, the last time I had a church it was Argyle and the Isles. Lovely place, the Western Islands. You must go if you get the chance. You are a traveller, aren't you?'

'I have done rather a lot of it,' Persis concedes.

'Ah, there, you see, I knew it. I looked at you and thought 'Only a really well travelled person looks that at home after a fortnight in a new place.' And was I right? I was. I always am with things like that. The Western Isles, remember. Very remote but very beautiful. Remind me, where is it you're from?'

'Canada, Toronto,' says Persis, surprised she has managed to interject even this much.

'Really? How very remarkable. I studied there for a time you know. At the university. I suppose you know it?'

'We lived very near it, on Sussex Avenue –when we weren't travelling that is.'

'Sussex Avenue? Now that really is something. I wonder…there used to be a church on Huron street. What would it have been called…'

'St Thomas's?'

'Ah! So it _is_ still there! Better and better! But you don't know it? I mean, my memory of Toronto was that it was the Presby churches that were fullest on a Sunday.'

'It's still like that. Our church was Knox, up on Spadina.'

'There, I'm right again. I _knew_ you'd need to be taught the choreography of the Mass. It is choreography here too; well, you know, you were here the other week. Mind, we're not so bad as some. St. Stephen's College chapel is even higher up the candle than we are, and Pucey house, ah you want to see Pucey house –part of your college too, that is – would like to make believe it's Roman, only the Romans won't let them. Oh, and you must see All Saints, Margaret Street in London sometime. Makes us look almost as low as St. Ebbes, does All Saints, Margaret Street.' None of this means anything to Persis but it doesn't matter because before she can venture even this much, Father Cameron has moved on.

'Now let me think,' he is saying, 'Knox on Spadina…wonderful Gothic style building, that, isn't it?'

'Yes, that's the one.'

'I never attended, of course. As an Anglican one didn't. But I do make a hobby of collecting churches. I like to see what they put in the windows and what hymnals they use. Ah ha, here's where the choreography comes in. Daniel's started the introit –lovely bit of Bach that, isn't it? –and we'd better stand for the crucifer. We'll offend him otherwise. Servers can be so very touchy sometimes.' In the low light of the church Father Cameron's green eyes flash and sparkle like warm green embers.

'Now, I'll bow, but you needn't feel you must do the same, and just look to me for directions when you need them. I'll do my best to whisper cues for you. It's not a very user-friendly order of service, I know. I've been saying so to Fr. Martin for years.'

* * *

Afterwards, during the agape, he hovers at Persis's elbow, fetching tea for them both and demonstrating the kind of courtesy Ken has always affected to have, and Stuart has flirted with, but that Persis associates most deeply with Japan.

'Tell me, do you think us _very_ Popish?' asks Father Cameron candidly.

'I couldn't hope to tell you without completing more of a survey,' says Persis.

'That is a diplomatic answer and it isn't fair, because it cheats me of a proper opinion. Ah well, perhaps you can be more definitive on the question of whether or not I dare to commit the dangerous crime of taking a second biscuit?'

'I think that would be all right.'

'Exactly the answer I was hoping for. But I'm holding you responsible if Mrs. Doggett at refreshments raises objections. '

They have been standing nearer the pews than the refreshment table for fear of obstructing access to that eighth sacrament as observed in Anglican churches the world over –tea. Around them have sprung up tight knots of people who have seized this chance to trade a week's worth of gossip without fear of repercussions, and it is through these myriad clusters that Father Cameron weaves his way back to the refreshment table. Persis watches him tack a path with all the effortlessness of some sage and courteous butterfly, nodding and smiling at people as he goes. Now and again he raises his cup, empty now of church-tea as if in justification of his travels.

When Father Cameron returns it is with a biscuit in each hand. 'I told them I was on the welcome committee,' he says.

'And Mrs. Doggett at refreshments?'

'She was very nice about it; said I'd better take one for you, too.' He holds out one of the biscuits genially. 'Victoria ones too –very grand.'

'You have mine,' says Persis, and this time she does give way to laughter.

'Are you sure?' asks Father Cameron, sounding quite as earnest as if the fate of many nations hangs upon the answer. 'Victoria biscuits aren't to be sniffed at, you know. Usually we only have garden-variety Osbornes.'

'Absolutely certain. The welcome committee has been more than kind.'

'Not at all, not at all,' says Father Cameron, dispensing with his second biscuit an contemplating the third, 'I'm enjoying this. Shall I walk back your way and tell you a bit about people? That way I can call in on Mia too. Ask if there's anything her mother wants from the chemist for her cold –or did you say it was 'flu?'

'I'd like that very much.'

'Marvellous. But what _was_ it that ailed Mrs. Glover?'

'I haven't the least idea,' said Persis apologetically. 'It changes every second day.'

'Ah, far oftener than that,' says Father Cameron comfortably. They begin to in the direction of Norham Gardens. As they go Father Cameron relays odd bits of trivia about Mary Magdalene.

'We're due a new curate,' he says. 'Father Martin's good, of course, that's not the point; he's hopelessly overworked. The trouble is, the last chap we had for curate –out of Cuddesdon too –was not at all our sort. We did our best to muddle on and make do, but really, the poor fellow didn't know which part of the thurible belonged up. If we'd kept him on the whole place would have been coming down round our ears in flames. Though I gather he's quite comfortably settled elsewhere now…Crampton Hodnet possibly, or perhaps it was Thrush Green…No, definitely Oxfordshire, I think. Nice man, as I say, called Halloran. I wonder if Mia will remember where he's gone… Of course Miss. Morrow might know. Now she…'

It strikes Persis, listening to the amicable chatter of her companion, that there is no one Father Cameron does not know. Even outside the confines of the church he continues to hail passers-by with individualised greetings. Sometimes he offers titbits about them to Persis as they pass on. This one he attends concerts at the university with, this one he meets up with of an evening for a drink, this one –said in the sort of undertone reserved to convey news of a death –has gone over to Rome and now is never seen at church, not Father Cameron's church anyway, which comes to the same thing.

'I don't suppose,' he says at length, 'that you ever ran across a Father Mallory back in Canada? He was at University of Toronto too, you see. We were at St. Michael's together. I have a sort of idea he got a seaside parish somewhere –you do have sea in Canada, don't you?'

'Yes, though not in Toronto. What did you say he was called?' The name has jostled something in Persis's memory, though she cannot at that moment say what.

'Mallory. The church had a feast day for a name I think. Something like Holy Trinity or All Souls or –'

'Not All Saints'?' says Persis, her memory finally beginning to work. It has conjured up late night conversations with Una over cups of cocoa, and the musical chatter of Bruce's fair-haired Maisey, chorister and pet alto of the Lowbridge Episcopal church.

'Not Father Mallory of All Saints?'

'Yes!' said Father Cameron triumphantly, 'that's the one! How very gratifying to find the world so small. I sometimes think I'm beginning to forget things.'

'I seriously doubt that.'

'You sound just like Mia the way you say that,' Father Cameron says approvingly. 'About Mia now, I especially wanted to ask –you will be a friend to her, won't you?'

'I'd certainly like to be. We seem to be getting on well enough at the moment,' Persis says, a bit perplexed.

'It's more than that, though. You must make her _do_ things, do you promise? You must get her out of that house and away from that controlling mother of hers and make her really _live_. She did used to, you know. When she was at St Hilda's she did all sorts for them –especially for the chapel –and still came out with a double first, or would have if the university had had the brains to recognise their women were just as entitled as their men to have letters put after their names and let them matriculate. She couldn't then, Oxford you know got terribly behind all those red brick institutions springing up, though now of course that's changed…She'd have been given a degree proper _now_.'

'Anyway, she left with what _should_ have been a double first and went back to Margery Glover –that's her mother –because she really _was_ ill then, and Mia got her through it, crisis and all, _and_ without a doctor because her mother wouldn't have one. All that makes sense, but what needles me is seeing her still shut up in that that house waiting on Margery Glover hand and foot, as if the woman had never got over the Influenza. Now it's none of my business, but if you ask me, when it comes to a conflict of interests like that, it's the parents that ought to give way to the children. The children have a kind of biological priority if you like. What I mean is, that isn't any way for a healthy young person to live –ministering to aspidistras and stubborn parents. Not that Mia's ever said she wants away from the place. Naturally she wouldn't. She's what Fr. Martin would call an 'everyday saint,' which is the sort of stuff that sounds well in a sermon but is exasperating to bear witness to in real life. Go on, tell me to leave well enough alone, and that I don't sound a bit like a priest.'

'You don't,' says Persis, 'but I agree with you, so that's all right.'

'You'll promise then? You'll do your best to borrow Mia away from that house and give her a taste of some other kind of life?'

'Well I'll certainly try.'

'Good, that's good. I shall help you, and that will make it easier. I've been known before now to make Miss Mia listen to me, at least inasmuch as she listens to anyone. She wouldn't listen to Margery Glover, I venture, if the woman hadn't nearly been killed by that dreadful influenza that went about. Now, have I told you about…' On Father Cameron talks, and it was hardly surprising, when on regaining the Norham Gardens house Persis is left with the curious impression that she has been in Oxford rather longer than her two calendar weeks.


	4. Chapter 4

_With thanks always to those of you who take the time to read and/or review._

* * *

'Who was that who's just gone to call on the Glovers?' asks Carl of Persis when she comes in. He has been sitting at the dining table, which dominates what would in a larger house serve as the front hall, and ostensibly studying an article on the migratory patterns of fruit point of fact the chief function of the article has been to serve as a distraction from watching the window until Persis' return. Now she sets her gloves down on a side-table and says as if the answer to his question were perfectly obvious, 'That was Father Cameron,' much as if she had known the man her whole life and is surprised by his curiosity.

'I see, and he's what? Our local priest? Something in chapel?'

'Neither,' says Persis, joining Carl at the table, 'he's retired. He shares our theory about Mrs. Glover by the way.'

'Really?' Carl asks in surprise, then as he begins to fold up the article on fruit bats, 'I've met her incidentally, while you were out.'

'And what is she like?'

'Formidable.'

'I gather she's used to bossing Mia.'

'I'd never have thought it,' says Carl, seemingly in earnest. His eyes betray him and crinkle at the corners. 'She spent three-quarters of an hour leaning on the fence telling me how to prune the yews and that hedge at the bottom of the garden. It can't have been comfortable for her –the fence I mean, she was obviously enjoying dictating to me. I was cutting something back too much –or possibly not enough.'

'Well you can't have been doing both,' says Persis, not unreasonably.

She goes through to the kitchen as she speaks and taking the root vegetables out of the pantry, begins to make a start on dinner.

'No,' says Carl following her and hovering in the doorframe. 'I suppose not. But really, you try taking orders from her sometime and see how clear-headed you feel after the fact. I don't know how Mia does it.' Then as an afterthought, 'can I do anything useful?'

'You could lay the table if you like. I thought you'd had rather enough of being told what to do?'

'The hedges were the least of it,' Carl agrees, looking improbably under the kitchen basin for the table linen.

'In the cupboard beside the stove,' says Persis, never pausing in her dicing of carrots. 'What else was there, besides the hedges?'

'Don't. I'm just beginning to forget. There was a list as long as my arm of flowers I was supposed to be bedding down for summer. Though it did give me a chance to air that paper on the life cycle of cicadas.'

'You did what?'

'I'm supposed to be lecturing a tutorial on them. I thought talking through the paper out loud would help me work out what needed revising.'

'You could have talked at me about cicadas. I wouldn't have minded.'

'I didn't think you'd find them terribly interesting,' says Carl.

'Go back a bit, I missed the part where you told me Mrs. Glover was a cicada devotee.'

'We-ell,' says Carl thoughtfully, and bends to smooth the tablecloth.

'Oh all right, tell me with a straight face that you weren't in any way trying to alienate our friend's mother, also our neighbour, and I'll be satisfied.'

'We-ell,' says Carl again, but his sense of humour betrays him. Discovered, his lips quirk upwards into a grin and he says, 'look, you try spending an hour – '

'I thought it was three quarters of one?'

'It was a long time anyway,' Carl says. 'You try coping with her next time and see if you don't resort to telling her about the number of declensions there are in Czech, or something similar.'

'Have I _ever_ subjected you to a conversation on the nuances of Czech?'asks Persis, pausing in her peeling of potatoes to look over at Carl. He is hovering uncertainly in the middle of the kitchen, as if trying to divine the location of the cutlery in the least intrusive manner possible.

'No, but you might subject _her_ to them. You've not met her, remember?' he says, opening a cupboard door apparently at random. Persis takes pity on him and extracts two place-settings from a drawer at her elbow and holds them out to Carl.

'You're not making me wildly anxious to do so, I've got to tell you,' she says as she does so.

'There you are then. Tell me about Father Cameron. He looked altogether friendlier than Mrs. Glover was. What's he like?'

'He knows Father Mallory.'

'Who? I'm not meant to know him, am I?' Carl is now squinting in the effort of remembering, elbows propped against the dining table. The name has none of the resonance for him that it so obviously conjures for Persis.

'From Maisey's church.'

Carl looks blank.

'Remind me about Maisey?' he asks appealingly, squinting harder.

'The chorister friend of Bruce's.'

'Oh, I see,' says Carl as a memory stirs, 'he's Canadian then, Father Cameron?'

'No, he just happened to visit there once, and has a very long memory.'

* * *

They are still talking over their acquisition of Fr. Cameron as one of their people, when there comes the apologetic rap at the front door that already they have learned to recognise as idiosyncratic of Mia.

'I'm not intruding?' she asks as she is motioned into the house and out of the temperamental sunshine. Carl can't help teasing her.

'If you were, don't you think we'd tell you?'

But of course nothing could be farther from Mia's expectation. The only person, she says as she sits down at the table, in the habit of telling her anything plainly, is her mother.

'Well you're not, and we would,' says Carl resolutely. Persis, reappearing from the kitchen with an extra tea bowl for Mia, nods her agreement.

Mia accepts the tea bowl, and curls up almost childishly at her place, tucking her feet underneath her body, her posture betrayed into a curve that presses her clumsily against the table and makes her look more diminutive than ever. Everything about her is young that afternoon, Persis decides, as she pours tea and listens to Mia, who is full of inoffensive gossip about people still mostly unknown to Carl and Persis. In this gently flowing chatter Mrs. Glover who has bested the headache she woke up with, Fr. Cameron who will shortly be off to hear some renowned choir at somewhere-or-other and Laurence Hodges of the violin, who will shortly find himself with a new home stand out as exceptions.

* * *

 _Joyous news_ , Persis writes to Nina later, _Laurence Hodges –he of the caterwauling violin –is to have a room in St. Edmund's for his honours year. We will no longer be plagued by talk of Greats and the despairing wail of Mozart as his music is hopelessly mangled. I'm afraid it means I never will be able to tell you if he makes a concert performer, but just at the moment I rather suspect he won't. (Forgive me sounding uncharitable; this comes after lying awake all last night listening to one of Brahms's Hungarian Dances being murdered. It was a slow death and it wasn't put out of its misery until half past three by the clock.)_

 _He will of course, want replacing and Mia seems to think a note in the church bulletin would suffice, and I expect it would if Mrs. Glover would allow it, which she won't. None of us can understand why, and are all past guessing. When Fr. Cameron got to hear of it he was the closest I have yet seen him to exasperated. He might talk in so many superlatives, but buried in them are gems of real sincerity, such as his affection for Mia, who is now anxious, and pretending she isn't, about keeping that great sprawling house running without the extra income. She will never say so, so of course I will never let on I've guessed, but it would be hard not to. The worry is there in the crease of her forehead and the way she nibbles at her lip in-between sips of tea. And you have more cause than most to vouch for the fact that I can, in fact, read people with a tolerable degree of accuracy._

 _You will gather from all of this that we have pretty well gathered our people about us and are more at home than we've had cause to be elsewhere._

 _Write and tell me how long_ _Rosenkavalier_ _is due to run for, won't you? Carl and I will go up to see it if we can. I've been hearing nothing but good things about your Marschallin, the latest from a quarter very nearly to home, too. Father Cameron would have it that you sing the part even better than Lotte Lehmann. I guessed he was keen on music when I met him, but I'm only now discovering just how keen he is. There are no lengths he won't go to it seems, for good music. Little wonder then that he should retire to Oxford. Or that he should take to your interpretation of Strauss. He got quite excited when it transpired I knew you well, had lived next door to you all through the war. He had been asking about Sussex Ave or I don't suppose it would have come up. Once it had, he looked as if Christmas had come early. If we_ _do_ _ever get you to Oxford, I'm afraid you won't just be visiting with Carl and I._

 _Pass on my love to Stuart. I can't quite believe he's already back in Canada –such a flying visit! Though as I write that, I can't help remembering how demanding the Royal Conservatory was of you and have an even harder time believing he got even a brief holiday to make the trip. I'm half afraid to ask how he contrived it._


	5. Chapter 5

_With thanks, always for your reading and reviewing. I write for you and love hearing your thoughts._

* * *

In early May, Nina takes the train from London Paddington to Oxford, where she is met by Carl, who does not see her until she is well off of the platform and almost immediately in front of him because she has approached from too far to the right.

'I'm sorry to miss you,' he says, offering her an arm, 'I didn't see you for looking,' and means it sincerely.

'That's my fault,' says Nina, slipping a gloved hand into the crook of the elbow Carl offers her. 'I'd forgotten which side was your bad one. I didn't see you for nearly long enough when you came back to Toronto to make remembering a habit.'

'Habit's nothing to do with it,' says Carl cheerfully. ' _I_ keep forgetting I can't see out that side any more than I can the back of my head. It's doing terrible things to the nerves of the 'cyclists here.'

'The 'cyclists will live,' says Nina. 'What have you done with Persis?'

'At home, sorting out something for you to eat, on account of her memory of the Paddington train is it isn't a long enough train to be possessed of a dining-car.'

'It _is_ home then? That's all right –I worried when I arranged it all those months ago.'

'I can't think why,' says Carl, 'it's almost like being in Toronto, if a bit quieter.'

'Toronto _is_ quiet,' Nina insists.

'You're too much in London,' says Carl and laughs good-naturedly. 'Sometime Ken must have you over to the Island, or you must go with us. Toronto will feel a proper city after that.'

'I'd like that,' says Nina as they thread their way through the crowds on Magdalene Bridge, 'I've heard so much about it, and for so long, that I almost feel I know it, but not quite. Places never are quite the way we picture them somehow.'

'No.'

On Park's Road, the Pitt Rivers Museum comes looming into existence, only to be displaced by the sprawling orange brickwork of Keble College.

'And here?' says Nina, nodding to the college as they pass, 'is it the way you pictured it to be?'

'A little. It's not so austere as I worried it would be.'

Then they are at the house, _Silver Moon_ etched on the ironwork of the gate, Symp parading along the top, oblivious to its spokes. He stops when he sees them coming, as if considering whether or not he can let them through. Then he thrusts his head forward affectionately and nuzzles the hand Carl has intended for the latch of the gate.

'You'd make it ever so much easier Symp,' he says, 'if you'd leave me to do the things that need thumbs. Can't you go and complicate life in the kitchen –or have you done that?'

If Symp has done this, he is not averse to doing so over again, because he leaps off of the gate and leads the way with great dignity up to the front door of his house, tail and owlish head held high, and scratches to be let in.

'I thought that must mean you were here,' says Persis, coming to the door and holding her hands out to Nina.

'You _are_ a sight for sore eyes –lovely and fresh as ever, even minutes after alighting from a train. I can't tell you how I've missed you. But you were longer than we thought, was it an awkward journey?'

'This as if you're always coming and going to London,' says Nina lightly, taking Persis's hands and pressing them. 'Instead of which it's been what? One month? Two? Since you've been here. And ages too long since I've seen you to talk to.'

'It has been too,' Persis says, moving with Symp into the hall making ingress for the others possible. 'Letters aren't the same at all. How are you? We've heard only good things about _Rosenkavalier_.'

'Whoever from? Did Stuart write to you then?' As she says it, Nina follows Persis into the house and begins to unbutton her gloves. Having done that she removes them and folds them neatly before placing them inside her hat.

'Stuart,' says Persis, thinking of the bright-eyed, curly-haired boy from South Drive, who had acted the part of younger brother to herself and Nina, 'hasn't written a word. Had it not been for you, I should have had no idea he'd been visiting.'

'Completely without warning too,' says Nina, 'but by his account _not_ without leave. I'll let you decide whether you believe that or not –I _think_ I do.'

'I see,' says Persis, taking Nina's hat –a straw trilby shot through with a ribbon the same gauzy blue as her gloves – and coat from her as she speaks. 'You still haven't said how you are,' she says as she affixes the coat and hat to pegs on the rack.

'Quite bewitched by your cat,' says Nina. 'How did you come to have him?'

'There's a story in that,' says Carl and they sit down to talk over dinner.

* * *

Symp almost comes to them in the usual way of cats. They are first alerted to his existence by a commotion in the back garden consisting of a lot of high-pitched crying.

'Why it's a Lucy-dog,' says Carl of the excitable German Shepherd straining at its lead, when he and Persis are finally drawn out into the garden to guess at the root of the commotion. Persis does not say anything; she is to arrested by the sight of the generously proportioned tabby stranded in the yew tree nearest the garden fence.

'Sorry,' says the sheepish owner of the Lucy-dog. 'I thought I'd cured him of that. He thinks he likes cats,' he adds genially, ' and he does, but they don't always like him. I take it yours is one of the kind that doesn't?'

Persis is on the verge of explaining that the cat in the yew tree isn't their cat but at the last possible moment she is struck by its deeply green, deeply sympathetic eyes and it becomes too much.

'No,' she says, and begins to disentangle cat from tree. 'No, he doesn't.'

For a protracted and stilted moment, they stand studying one another over the garden fence, the undergraduate with the dog straining its lead, Persis, still partly submerged in the leafy yew with the cat that will become Symp in her arms, and Carl looking faintly curious, squinting with his good eye in the sunlight. He appears to be trying to place the undergraduate, though it may simply be that he's spotted a lesser-known woodland this-or-that on the garden fence, Persis can't tell.

'I'm Wincham,' says the boy eventually, 'Albert Wincham. I'm sorry about the dog.'

They begin to wave the apology away to the indignation of Symp, who has settled comfortably into Persis's arms, his owlish head nestled against her shoulder.

Then, 'I know you from somewhere,' says the young man called Wincham. 'You're around college sometimes, I think.' He is looking at Carl and trying not to be bowled over by the exuberance of the German Shepherd.

'Keble?' says Carl with interest.

'Oh yes, I read Divinity. I'm writing up about the Greek Church Fathers at the moment.'

'Then that's why I can't place you,' says Carl, 'I read sciences. Insects and things.' He waves a hand in the direction of the yew trees whence a collection of inchworms are just discernible among the budding foliage.

* * *

'We'd have invited him in,' says Persis to Nina as they sit at the round dining table, 'only I couldn't for the life of me think what to do about the dog. It obviously terrified Symp…'

'And by then we'd pretty well adopted him,' finishes Carl. Then clarifying, 'the cat, not the lad.'

'Yes, I'd worked that out,' says Nina, her laughter shimmering in the sunlight, hanging like gossamer in the air in the aftermath of their conversation.

'Oh it's _good_ to sit and talk like this again. When was the last time it happened?'

They _think_ it must have been Carl and Persis's wedding, but cannot quite be sure. They have corresponded with such regularity in the intervening years that it feels like only the other day.

'Mia would rather like her mother to take him on as a lodger, you know, to replace the violinist-who-wasn't,' says Persis of the Wincham boy.

'Will she?' asks Nina, fondling Symp's ears, which are owlishly folded almost in half, adding no doubt to his look of world-weariness.

'Oh, no,' says Carl easily, 'not for want of trying, mind you. Fr. Cameron's argued the point, so have we, so has the curiously remote Fr. Martin whose church has so readily assimilated us and so thoroughly integrated Mia. It's not made a bit of difference. He'd be ideal as far as Mia's mother's concerned, if it weren't for the dog. Mind you, for once Mrs. Glover and I almost agree; the Lucy-dog upsets Symp.'

'I thought you were partial to dogs?' says Nina.

'I am,' says Carl, a shadow crossing and rapidly departing his forehead, 'provided they don't needle Symp.'

'And Lucy,' says Persis easily, almost as an afterthought, 'isn't a consideration at all?'

'Oh,' says Carl, 'well…' But he leaves the thought suspended, dismissing it with a wave of his hand and a lift of his shoulders.

'Tell me,' says Nina when no further answer appears forthcoming, 'when do I get to meet Mia and the rest of your Oxford people?'

She has hardly said it when the front door to Silver Moon comes lightly off the latch and Father Cameron can be seen, tall in the sunlight, green eyes like subaqueous candles, standing in the doorway.

'Ah,' he says warmly, 'the Marschallin herself.'

Nina is laughing and holding her hands out to him when Mia appears at his elbow, eyes bright, saying, 'you mustn't take him very seriously. He talks an awful lot of nonsense. I've no end of sympathy for that congregation of his in the Western Isles.'

'You're forgetting poor Argyle,' says Father Cameron mildly, before steering Nina in the direction of the front room and its settee.

'Do you understand any of it?' asks Mia mildly, nodding at the two musically-minded people –strangers not half a moment ago –talking away on the settee.

'Not a word,' says Persis. 'I never have, and I never will.'

* * *

It is a lovely visit. Nina has somehow dodged a week's worth of engagements, handing _Rosenkavalier_ and its paraphernalia to an understudy.

'Won't they mind?' asks Persis anxiously, glad of the visit and simultaneously not wanting to interfere with the inroads Nina has worked so hard to make into the world of opera.

'The understudy? Not at all –she was nearly weeping in gratitude. It'll be her start, I suppose. That's so often the way.'

'Is it? But you know, I was thinking more of Covent Garden.'

'They know they're home to me,' says Nina, 'so of course they're being good about it. Partly that's because your Father Cameron does know what he's on about under all that hyperbole –it really _is_ me or Lotte Lehman if they want the Marschallin sung well –partly because neither they nor I can remember the last time I had a holiday. Besides, it's only two nights this week I'm missing. I'll be back in time for Monday's performance, even if the train out of Oxford _is_ late.'

'It may well be,' says Carl, looking up from the draft of a lecture he is composing, 'I think there's a law that says all travellers have to be held at least half an hour at Reading. What's your opinion of Anobiidae?'

Persis and Nina tell him apologetically that they haven't the least idea what he's talking about, much less an opinion. Symp though, climbs up onto the table by way of Carl's knee and thence traipses about on the lecture notes, leaving delicately inked paw prints behind among Carl's scribbling by way of meaningful contribution.

* * *

It does not take long for Mia to extend an invitation round to the people of Silver Moon and its guests for afternoon tea. Her appearance in the sitting room complete with invitation-card is a formality she endures to placate her mother; they have all fallen out of the habit of anything like invitations months ago.

'We weren't sure of the form as regards renowned sopranos,' says Mia, but her eyes are flashing with that wit of hers that is all too often stifled.

'Much the same as for ordinary people,' says Nina. 'Persis will tell you. In another life we read letters over each other's shoulders, poured cups of tea for one another, and I talked a good deal of music at her. Persis drew, naturally. I suppose you do still?'

That this last comes out a question is a testament to how much time really has elapsed since they were together.

'Only when I'm not entertaining Field-Marschallins' wives,' says Persis, and now they all laugh. 'When are we due for tea, Mia?'

Four o'clock finds them convened in the overwhelming drawing room of the Glover house, threading their way through aspidistras, benjaminas and elaborately carved furniture, ably guided by Mia.

'You'll have to forgive me,' she says with the air of one breaking terrible news, 'but I've invited Father Cameron too. He's been so good to me, I could hardly leave him out.'

Of course they do not mind, and say so; Mia visibly relaxes. 'Only I know I'm intruding upon your visit terribly.'

'Not in the least,' says Nina, 'I've been hearing about you for months, I've been curious to meet you.'

'Whatever gives you that idea?' Persis asks simultaneously, thus betraying the roots of this old and well-established friendship.

'Something mother said,' says Mia, fussing over the tea service.

A look passes three ways between Carl, Persis and Nina, and suddenly Nina is in on the conspiracy to remove the overbearing influence of Mrs. Glover from Mia's life.

Mia is passing Royal Albert china round the room when Father Cameron makes his entrance.

'Hello my dear,' he says to the back of Mia's head, 'any progress in the direction of a new lodger for your mother to take on?'

'None,' says Mia, half-turning and handing him a piece of Royal Albert too.

'That may be rather strong,' she says, ever apologetic. 'I've been pouring back and forth between the others, to get the same strength tea you know…' It is a trick she has learned off of Persis, who herself acquired it as a girl by scrutinising Japanese tea ceremonies. Father Cameron adds a moderate measure of milk, considers, decides against sugar, sips at the tea and waves the apology away.

'Excellent as ever, Mia,' he says, and sits carefully on the edge of an overwrought armchair.

'Any word on the new curate?' she asks of Father Cameron.

'No luck whatever,' he says unconcernedly, sipping again at his tea. 'We haven't got a curatage on offer, and that's half the trouble. There's no room at the clergy house of course, or we could set him up there. He's going to need somewhere to live, wherever he is. China tea, this, isn't it? Such a treat. I can't remember…'

'I don't suppose,' says Carl, 'you'd have more luck if you tried suggesting to anyone who wanted the position they could stay on here? Not to volunteer the house, Mia,' he adds quickly, 'only it's near and –'

'And it would solve everyone's troubles at once,' says Mia with gratitude. 'That _is_ clever, and we never should have thought of it. That's the sort of logic that brought you to us. Even mother couldn't fault a curate.'

'Not even one that plays the violin?' Nina asks, and they are all laughing again.

'He can play whatever he likes,' says Mia, 'provided he really _can_ play. There are nights I've woken up thinking I'm hearing that ungodly violin, only to realise after a heartbeat it's a screech-owl or something. I can't begin to tell you. Here, give me your cup, Nina, let me refill it.'

'I thought I was doing well at savouring the novelty of a teacup that didn't scald my hands too,' says Nina, with an impish look at Persis. 'How the pair of you get on with those cast-iron ones I shall never understand.'

'It wasn't so long ago you were positively acclimatised to them, Nina,' says Persis, her voice light and teasing. 'Aren't they grand enough for Field-Marschallin's wives?'

Nina shakes her head and brushes escaped strands of her golden hair behind her ears. _I'm only that on stage and you know it_ , say her eyes as they flash.

'Not so long ago,' she protests more audibly, 'it's been eight years since I've seen those coiled enamel dragons.' It doesn't feel like eight years to any of the people concerned though, as evinced by the incredulous negative expressed by Persis and Carl, and the alacrity with which they continue to parse such non-verbal cues as the creases at the corners of Nina's eyes, the slight frown that overtakes Carl's forehead but extends no further in his perplexity, and Persis's thoughtful fidgeting as she folds a crease into her skirt and counts the years backwards through the creases.

'I have great affection for those cast-iron teabowls and their dragons,' says Carl loyally, emerging from his confusion.

'Yes, and for my 'Song to the Moon,'' Nina agrees, 'but I'm no nearer to understanding either of those things now than I was years ago. Ta very much,' and she receives the Royal Albert back from Mia.

'London's catching,' says Mia, turning to Father Cameron, 'don't you think?'

'Catching what? Our Marschallin? Ah well, I suppose it did that some time ago.'

He hands his teacup to Mia for replenishing and over the silvery clink of the Royal Albert and the lightness of the laughter that tumbles out of the drawing room into a sunny North Oxford's late-afternoon, they are at ease, life is comfortable and the world feels as it should be. The thought of domineering Mrs. Glover, somewhere upstairs and submerged in pillows, and the lingering spectre of the war are but distant shadows, echoes of what has been. In half an hour perhaps these things will come more sharply into focus, but for the time being the tea, the chattering of the Royal Albert and the pervasive goodwill of the people assembled is enough to offer a glimpse of the new-created world they have been striving for. Much better, Fr. Cameron thinks as he stirs milk into his tea, to appreciate it while it lasts, than to question its longevity.


	6. Chapter 6

_As ever, thank you for reading and/or reviewing. That you take the time to do these things is always appreciated._

* * *

 _I've had a letter from Toronto_ , reads Persis from Nina's latest letter. It is early in the summer, and the weather conducive to sitting out of doors. They should be on the river, Carl says, but he would make a hopeless punter, forever knocking against boats advancing on the right of him, and Father Cameron says apologetically that it has been too long since he took a boat out for him to do anyone much good as a punter. Mia and Persis wave these objections away; it is infinitely more civilised they say, to stay on firm ground. They are sitting in the shade of the yew trees, taking their time over afternoon tea and yewberry tartlets while Symp suns himself on the stoop by the back door, tail twitching, watching lazily through half-closed eyes as ladybirds scuttle between the stones. The conversation, when not drifting to the dubious merits of boating expeditions, is dominated by Nina's latest letter.

 _There's a whole lot of news to pass on but I'll leave the chief of it to your mother, as I expect she's written you much the same things. The really vital thing is that Ken is talking of moving back to Toronto. He has taken a position with_ _The Globe_ _rather than accept the promotion to head of section at_ _Glen Notes_ _. He says it's because he'd rather have the time to write, unencumbered by extra responsibilities, but your father has decided there's more to it than that and won't stop needling him about it._

'I wonder what's made Ken do that,' says Persis, apparently to the argyle blanket they are sitting on. 'He was always fighting his way to the top of sets and what have you in school, and not just to please dad, whatever anyone tells you. He's clever; he used to like people knowing as much.'

Mia lifts her teacup to her lips, sips at it, sets it down again and murmurs something indistinct but sympathetic. She too once fought her way to the top of her set; in the sanctity of her room over the way there is the framed certificate from St. Hilda's testifying to the exams she sat and the double first she should have had could women have taken them back in 1918 to prove it. She is not sure she ever meant to proclaim the success to the world, but she does think that the college girl she was meant to do rather more with it than frame it and set it on the dresser.

To the argyle blanket, Carl says 'of course, _only connect,_ ' and the sense of this move of Kenneth Ford's falls into place for him. The others miss this revelation each for their own reasons; Mia is still wrapped up in a world of her own making, Persis is further untangling Nina's handwriting and Father Cameron is reminiscing.

'Good paper, _The Globe,_ ' he says. 'I remember reading that out in St. Michael's quad.'

'Yes but –'

'It will be the war, won't it?' says Carl softly, unexpectedly. 'He was section head of a kind over there by the end, wasn't he? Officer, or Captain, or whatever. You can hardly blame him not wanting to do the whole bit over again after that.'

'No,' says Persis by way of agreement, 'of course.' She wants to say she has thought of this idea and rejected it out of hand, but the truth is that it has never occurred to her any more than it has to Mia or Father Cameron. There is no reason it should have done; she was not in the war, not in the way Carl was or Ken was. Their reality was never hers.

'I hadn't thought,' says Persis, for herself as well as the others.

Carl helps himself to a scone, begins to butter it and shakes his head. _It doesn't matter_ , unspoken, _no reason you should have_. It is the sort of exchange the others in attendance wish they had made the effort to miss; intimate without effort.

'We should visit though,' Carl says. 'It would be good to visit.'

'Nina seconds you,' Persis says, and continues on with the letter.

 _I'll be back in Toronto sometime in the New Year. You might come visit then, and have a word with one or both of them –and while you're at it you can look into Massey Hall. I'll be there for a while singing Salome. The Strauss will be like coming home, after this Christmas fairytale I've been asked to sing, even if singing it may nearly kill me. I could dance once though, and I don't_ _think_ _I've forgotten how. 16 and the voice of Isolde he said; I could never sing Isolde and I'm ages older than he'd like, but so must be every soprano who's ever dared to sing the part._

'Now I should like to see that,' says Father Cameron with decided approval. 'No one better at singing Strauss than your Nina, and that you may tie to.' He has discovered Susan Baker's spirited idiom through listening to her letters read out, and has appropriated it. To Carl and Persis it now feels more the verbal property of their retired priest than Susan Baker's.

'I prophesy she proves the best Salome there's been to date. Do you believe me?'

'I think I'll run that opinion by Nina before I make up my mind,' says Persis.

'Isn't that cheating?' Carl wants to know. Father Cameron says it absolutely is, adding that to his way of thinking, Nina can't possibly be as much over 16 as all _that._

'We were in the same year at school,' says Persis, 'and that is the closest you are going to get to an answer, Father Cameron. She'd never forgive me anything more direct.'

'Salome,' says Mia, 'isn't that based on…'Mia's memory falters; reading English got her only as far as Milton, _because after that you can understand it on your own time; it looks like English after Milton_ , had said the uncompromising Dean of St Hilda's.

'…based on scripture?' says Father Cameron, 'yes, and Oscar Wilde too, of course, which is what you were thinking of, I suspect. _I've_ not forgotten you read English and Divinity just because others have. No, don't tell me it didn't count –I can see you're about to, Mia –it doesn't change the fact you read and excelled at both. Almost impossible to think of one without conjuring the other now, and so fascinating the way the original –such as we have it –has been embroidered. You must go,' he says, impulsively seizing Persis's hand in his own, 'you must go and tell me all about it.'

Before Persis can answer the telephone begins to sing its long-distance ring. They can hear it even out in the garden under the leafy canopy of the yews.

'You'd better get that,' says Carl apologetically, 'if I thought that corner of the house wouldn't kill me…' but Persis is already going. A long-distance call might be important and the telephone nook has too many angles, jutting corners and misplaced edges of sideboards, impossible to navigate if you can see only on your left.

'You'll never guess,' says an excitable Stuart Ross down the telephone, without even a 'hallo!' to make sure he's got the right caller.

'I almost certainly won't, if it's about music,' says Persis good-naturedly, as she leans against the sideboard, bracing herself for a lengthy talk with Stuart at his most excited. The denizens of the world of opera are few and far between; Nina might be one and Stuart about to be, but Persis and Carl are only ever as guests in a foreign country when it is talked about.

'It's about _Salome_ ,' says Stuart.

'If you mean Nina's singing in it, I've just been telling the others,' says Persis.

'Oh not _that_ ,' Stuart says carelessly, ' _'course_ you know that. No, it's about Herodes, you know, the king, or rather, the man singing him. You'll never guess.'

'Then you'd better not make me,' says Persis, with a smile for the framed watercolour of Rosedale ravine over the sideboard, because Stuart is not there to smile on and indulge. She can hear the pips in the line chattering away the minutes, calculating the time.

'Who do you think's singing it?'

'Go on and tell me Stuart, before you bankrupt your father placing this call. You _are_ calling from home?'

'Well they'd hardly let me call from the Conservatory would they,' and Persis can picture the way Stuart is almost certainly grinning; white teeth exposed, pink gums gleaming, the early morning light just catching on them and making them whiter and pinker and healthier than normal. She agrees the Conservatory would almost certainly refuse to let Stuart anywhere near a telephone for purposes of leisure communication, but doubts he'd pay much heed.

'You remember that tenor who sang the Prince all those years ago?' asks Stuart, 'the first time Nina sang _Rusalka_?'

'Vaguely,' says Persis; her chief memory of that evening is the music.

'Andrew something-or-other,' prompts Stuart, and now the memory does begin to come back to Persis, to solidify. She drums here unencumbered fingers against the edge of the sideboard and concentrates upon the watercolour of the ravine as though this will help focus the image of the young man she had once teased Nina about and whose face she has forgotten.

'Yes,' she says cautiously, 'the one you thought was in love with her.'

'That's the one,' says Stuart. 'Anyway, he's got the part of the king in _Salome_. I had no idea he could sing Strauss too, had you?'

'You know I know nothing about it,' says Persis, favouring the watercoloured Rosedale ravine with another smile. 'I can hardly remember his face, never mind his name, Stuart. I've no idea what he does or doesn't sing.'

'Oh, well,' says Stuart as though waving away a detail. 'Do you think I could ever sing Strauss?'

'I think you're asking entirely the wrong person and you know it,' says Persis into the telephone. 'You'd much better ask Nina.'

'But it _will_ be interesting to see how _Salome_ comes out, don't you think?'

'I expect it will come out the way it always does –with rather a better soprano than usual, that's all.'

'Yes but I mean –'

'You mean because of a tenor I can only half remember,' says Persis, at last humouring him, 'who may or may not still be in love with Nina, and that famous dance that's demanded of the soprano singing Salome, I know. For what it's worth Stuart, there's a list as long as my arm of young men more than half in love with Nina.'

 _And somewhere_ , she thinks as she studies the watercolour and the pips continue to chatter in the background, _somewhere along the line you've become one of them_. She is not sure when this has happened and anyway, she can't say that.

'She's never failed to survive singing opposite lovesick tenors before,' says Persis instead. 'Besides, when was the last time you remember Nina taking notice of more than her music when she's singing?'

'Oh that's not fair,' says Stuart, even though he's no more of a stranger to the revered iciness of Nina to her tenors and basses as circulated by newspapers and gossip than Persis is. 'She's a much better actress than that suggests, much warmer. She was always interacting with Octavian, or Sophie, or whoever was on stage with her in _Rosenkavalier_ lately, and you remember her Tatyana.'

Persis does, vividly, and if Stuart would give her the space to comment she would say so, would tell him that the thing she has never forgotten about Nina's Tatyana –impetuous letter-writing young girl that she was –, more devastating than any of the heartbreak of the first act, is how terrifyingly cold Nina could be when called on. She says none of this though because Stuart is still talking, even now beginging to concede her point from earlier.

'Though,' he is saying as Persis refocuses her attention on him, the memory of Nina's Russian Princess dismissed, 'I s'pose you're right about her serving the music first. She _will_ keep telling me to sing music for music's sake.'

He stops abruptly, out of breath. It is Stuart's _s'pose_ the old childish utterance that does it. Leaning against the sideboard in the awkwardly misshapen telephone nook, Persis looks up at the mounted watercolour of the Rosedale ravine and feels her heart turn over for the loss of little Stuart Ross, who has since grown up but who had once gone walking with her there. That was when he was still dedicated to watching trains and collecting beetles in jars, and any singing he had done had been flat nine times out of ten. In that far-away world, in that time the war has not tampered with, it was Ken that Stuart had revered; Nina and herself had featured only as good-natured chums of his sister Peggy, albeit chums who had had rather more time for his skinny self than most. Then Stuart had been doe-eyed and innocent and the world had been safe.

'I meant it as a compliment, Stuart,' says Persis, equal parts amused and forlorn. It is hard to look up at the picture of the ravine in its verdure and not remember the bright-eyed boy he had been, how like a faithful spaniel in his uncomplicated love for all of them, how like a calf or perhaps a child in the way he burrowed into one's side, rested his head on one's arm.

'You could do worse than listen to her,' says Persis now, 'Nina's rather good at what she does, Stuart. And you're forgetting I was there when she began; the world fell at her feet because of that devotion to her art, not in spite of it. I don't suppose it would have been half so interested if she'd been a whit less committed or a bit more invested in intrigues. Stars aren't supposed to be so easily brought down to earth from heaven, you know. Tell me, couldn't all this have just as easily gone in a letter, Stuart? This call must be costing you the earth.'

'Oh!' says Stuart, sounding genuinely surprised, 'I s'pose so. Only then I wouldn't have had your opinion all at once.'

Under the yews Father Cameron has taken out his common-place book from an inner jacket pocket and is drawing Carl an itinerary of all the things that must be done on this fictive return visit to Toronto, forgetting or else choosing to overlook that Persis has grown up there. They look up at her return, Mia wielding the teapot and pouring Persis a fresh cup, all of their eyes keenly interested, inquiring.

'Only Stuart,' she says as she reclaims her teacup from Mia. 'He's got all sorts of theatrical ideas. Not the least of them a wish to sing Strauss.'

'Can he?' asks Mia with interest.

Persis spreads her hands, reaches for the milk jug and measures milk carefully into her tea.

'I have absolutely no idea,' she says, and they laugh.

* * *

* _I've had to take a bit of a gamble with Mia's choice of subjects. Copious research has yielded up only that all subjects became open for women to attend if not actually take degrees in. While I do know English was a women's only subject, I can find nothing more specific. To that end, if my choices are at all anachronistic, I ask to be forgiven. Know I've done my best and made the effort at accuracy for you._


	7. Chapter 7

_With thanks always to my readers and/or reviewers. That you take the time even to read is always appreciated._

* * *

In the end it is Ken who comes to them. He comes in time to see the Lamas Fair in wild carnival throes. He recoils from the noise and the clatter as he and his sister wend their way through St. Giles, but Gil, then all of six **,** is enchanted by it.

'What's become of the others?' asks Persis as they walk, steering Gil out of the way of the queue that has formed for the Whip.

'They're in Canada,' says Ken as they thread their way through people gathering to watch the Dodgems in session.

'Really?' says Persis, 'and here I was thinking they were in sub-Saharan Africa at the very least. You _know_ that isn't what I meant. Why don't we get to visit with Rilla and Nora too?'

Gil veers towards the carousel and Ken dives after him, catches his collar and pulls him back with an ease that comes of practice.

'A handful of reasons,' says Ken. 'Rilla wants to pack up the house, or try to –it depends on whether Susan will let her –and even if she won't, she wants this last summer on the Island. Says it won't be the same only coming back to visit.'

'No, I suppose it wouldn't be. Think how different Toronto was once we were living there more than months at a time.'

Ye-es,' says Ken thoughtfully, 'I suppose. Funny Toronto should feel like coming home now, given how much time I've spent away from it.'

'Oh I don't know,' says Persis as they turn onto Parks Road, 'Toronto's one of the few places we put down roots, or certainly I did.'

'I did too,' says Ken. 'Well, perhaps not that exactly. It was Toronto I thought of though during the war…you and Nina sitting out under the yews reading over each other's letters the way you used to do when you were at Branksome together. Silly, isn't it?'

'Not really, no,' says Persis, who had spent the four harrowing years of the war trying to remember Ken had outgrown the unruly boy of his U.C.C. days that had so tormented the girls of French House at Branksome.

'Once you allow that Nina and I had pretty well stopped sharing all of every letter.'

'Nina never did, surely?'

'Oh yes she did,' says Persis, 'though not for the reasons you're conjuring. She was as cool then as she is now with the men whose hearts she insists on breaking. But she was beyond secretive about anything to do with her music. We didn't know the Met had been after her to sing _Rusalka_ until virtually the eve of her departure.'

Ken laughs, shakes his dark head and says, 'so that's why I was last to know –I always thought it was a plot you had all conspired against me. She had been in New York for months it seemed, by the time I got home. Now, have I satisfied you on the point of Rilla's staying back?'

They turn into Norham Gardens and Persis says he has not.

'Why won't Susan let her pack,' she asks, 'or is it sheer bossiness?'

'Well, it's much the same reason uncle Gil didn't want her travelling really.'

Persis shoos Symp off of the gate unceremoniously and leads brother and nephew onto the doorstep of Silver Moon where she fusses with the keys.

'Ken, do stop dodging the question and come to the point, will you?' she says as she unlocks the front door and lets them into the house.

'I thought you knew about Rilla expecting a baby.' Ken says helplessly, running a hand through his travel-tousled hair, and looking excessively awkward at having to make this communication outright. 'Have the others really not told you?'

'No, they've really not,' said Persis. 'When?'

'February sometime. Susan's furious about it because the baby will be born in Toronto and she feels sure there will be repercussions on its health. You might write to her and set her mind at rest; goodness knows we've tried.'

'I can't very well if I don't know about it, can I?' asks Persis as she lets them into the house.

'No-o, but you know now. Say you will.'

'I'll try, but you know Susan thinks what little midwifery I've got hold of to be a lot of myth and unchristian superstition. She's going to be terribly good at being a sister you know, Nora. She'll do no end of bossing.'

'I was afraid you'd say that,' says Ken with affected dismay, 'she's so terribly like _you_ , Butterfly.' Before Persis can answer he has gone on, 'I don't suppose you have anything like coffee on offer?'

'No,' says Persis, 'but there's tea if you like.'

Ken groans theatrically. 'I thought you assured me that we _wouldn't_ lose you to England?' he says, sitting down at the round kitchen table and stretching so that his feet knock gently against the sofa that acts as dividing wall between dining area and sitting room.

'You haven't,' says Persis over the water tumbling into the kettle.

'Have though,' says Ken. 'Just because it's happening by inches doesn't mean it isn't happening at all, and it certainly doesn't mean I've not noticed. Your letters sound more and more as if they've been lifted out of _Letters to Literary Ladies_ with every one you write.'

'They can't,' says Persis, 'because I could never bear Edgeworth to read, much less imitate. Moreover, I refuse to believe you've read her. You can't have done or you'd know I write nothing so didactic.'

Ken ignores her. 'It's tea now,' he says instead, 'I suppose next time I visit you'll sound English on top of the rest.'

'Stop wittering,' says Persis as she joins him at the kitchen table, 'and catch me up properly on what's been happening to our family while I've been away.'

Ken is quiet. He is quiet so long that Persis begins to wonder if this job won't be handed over to Gil, and it is then it occurs to her that as long as the little boy is with them they will never be able to talk. Once, Persis remembers, she and Ken had sat in the front of the Sussex Ave house listening for sounds of their parents and guarding their conversation against them. It's strange to think that time has turned the tables, that they are now the adults in this scenario, guarding against overcurious children. She sends Gil off in search of his uncle, ostensibly to ask if he'll come join them at tea and adding that she suspects there might be a treat for him in Carl' study.

That does it, and it is over tea drunk from the cast iron teabowls with their coiled red and gold dragons, that the reason for the move to Toronto emerges.

'Mum's all right, is she?' asks Persis when she has seen Gil safely up the stairs to the second floor.

'Oh yes,' says Ken, 'and dad too. Mum's more or less adopted Nina, not that Nina needs adopting.'

'Nina hardly ever seems to be in Toronto though,' says Persis.

'Well no,' says Ken, 'but she's there more than we are, or so I'm told, and of course you know –'

' –About Nina's aunt getting that Influenza that went round. I had heard, yes. Nina wrote to say when she'd died, thought I'd want to know. We'd have come back for the funeral if it had been possible, which it wasn't.'

'I was forgetting you see her more than we do now,' says Ken, sipping at his tea. 'China is this?' he asks.

'No, weak India I'm afraid, Darjeeling. It gets so very bitter if you don't pour it straight away.'

She makes no mention of the move to Toronto, nor does she ask for the reasons behind it. Ken has always told her things willingly; Persis does not mean to begin pressing him for information now. The enamel dragons on the teabowls catch the sunlight and look dappled as a result.

'It's nothing to do with the health of anyone in Toronto,' says Ken to reassure his sister. 'I thought I'd try another paper, that's all,' and he waves his hands evasively. The sunlight shifts and the dragons appear to wink.

Gil returns from the excursion to his uncle's study with a toy train in hand; he pads into the room silently and they miss his entry. While his aunt and father talk, he begins to drive it along the skirtingboard silently in an effort to catch what they are saying.

'And not be bogged down with section edits?' asks Persis mildly. She pours out more tea for them both.

'Something like that,' says Ken, and attempts the kind of grin he used to give her in boyhood, a Cheshire-cat grin Owen Ford called it. He does not look at her; rather he focuses on the wood of the table, appreciating its undecorated simplicity. Almost every other woman he has come to know would have stifled such a table with a tablecloth, a heavily embroidered one at that.

'Maple is this? Where from? I thought they didn't do sugar maples here?'

'Not in the same way, no.' Persis pours out more tea; that this should be necessary is due entirely to the smallness of the teabowls. Carl, she remembers had once likened them to thimbles.

'It's like this,' says Ken clumsily and without warning, 'the last time I was put in charge of anything, Butterfly, it was a lot of men's lives. If I said they'd all come back alive –well you don't need me to tell you what a lot of rubbish that would be. You went down for Walter's memorial, and later Robert Ross's –and I know you never cared for Robert, that you went with Nina to the service so that little Stuart wouldn't be on his own –but God knows your names were linked enough in our school days.' He inhales shakily in an effort to stem this spate of words. If he means to real them in he does not succeed.

'I spent years giving orders, and the longer that dammed war dragged on the more of them I was obliged to give. I did it too, somehow or other I nerved myself to send a lot of healthy men into total destruction. Then Walter was killed. You remember, you wrote and told me it had happened.'

Press doesn't dare interrupt. Almost imperceptibly she nods her acknowledgement of this truth.

'Suddenly they weren't just men in my troop, they were brothers, or sons or husbands, friends of someone, do you see? I spent an awful night working out how much blood was on my hands. Not just from battling Germany, but for following orders, for giving _them_ orders. I couldn't do it any more, only I had to, because those were _my_ orders, and the blasted war wasn't anywhere near ending. If I didn't do as I was told I supposed I'd be killed myself, and I'd promised you I'd not do anything so idiotic as get myself killed. I kept on giving orders for the sake of not getting killed, and every time I did I thought I was killing Walter all over again, because all of those men were someone's Walter, weren't they? But I'd promised I'd not get killed and I was determined I wouldn't be. I wasn't either…but I think they killed whatever part of me knew how to be in charge, Butterfly. Does that make sense? I can't even tell Gil and Nora not to do the things that Rilla wishes they wouldn't do; I've tried and the words stick. It's ludicrous, but it's the truth, and it's why I can't take over heading the section of _Glen Notes_ , because I could no more tell them how to run the section and what changes to make to the copy than I can give my own children rudimentary discipline. Is there more tea?'

'Yes, here.'

'You don't seem terribly surprised, Butterfly.'

'No,' Persis says. 'No. Carl thought it would be something like that.'

'Did he? Mind you, he was a keeper wasn't he, for the dogs, when we deigned to bring them in. I suppose he must have been in a pretty good position to see what was going wrong.'

'I think so, yes,' says Persis; if she is cautious it is only because she knows very little about what the war was like for Carl, he has never volunteered much about it and she has never been brave enough to ask.

'Funny,' says Ken, 'I'd not have said dogs and people were so much alike. But thinking on it, it's not so different. Both goodhearted, loyal, willing to die for you… I guess they're close enough all right. What gets me is…' Ken, who has been tracing a design on the lip of his teabowl, looks up sharply. 'How in God's name do you make sense of all that, Butterfly? Don't tell me you don't understand, your eyes are betraying you.' He smiles, but it is a poor imitation of the Cheshire-cat smile this time, a wan, lackluster affair that betrays not the boy he was but the man he has become.

'Whenever I'm out in the garden,' says Persis softly, 'and the wind brings the scent of the yew berries to me across the lawn, suddenly we're at war again. I was sitting under ours on Sussex Ave when Stuart told me. It doesn't begin to compare, I know –I only fought for normalcy at home – but I do know what potent things memories are.'

'Only,' says Ken, laughing, and reaching for his sister's hand. 'You have no idea how grateful I was –we all were –for that. If home hadn't been home to come back to we never could have done it. Ask Carl sometime.'

Persis shakes her head. 'I couldn't,' she says. 'I've never lost my fear of ghosts.' She offers him a smile, and this at least is a proper smile, the moonlight-soft one that has stuck with her even through the war and that reminds Ken why he went away to fight in the first place.

'That's why Toronto then,' she says by way of an answer on his behalf. 'To stay on the receiving end of instructions?'

'That's about the sum of it. You won't let on?'

'Have I ever?'

'No,' says Ken. 'No –silly question. Strike it from the registrar. Aren't you the littlest bit pleased my name will find its way into _The Globe_? It's a rather better paper.'

'It's only your due,' says Persis. 'I've been saying for years you're too good a writer to be kept in obscurity.'

'We'll find out, won't we? Why do you suppose the others have such little faith in me?'

'Don't be daft,' says Persis, 'and don't fish. It doesn't suit you. They'll miss having you near, that's all it is. Susan's never really forgiven mum and dad all those years we spent abroad, you know she hasn't. You must remember what she was like when she found out Carl and I were moving here. And now you're going back to Toronto and taking Rilla and the children with you…you didn't really think you'd manage that without a fuss?'

It is a glorious, soft visit. When Ken has recovered from the experience of travelling over to England, he goes with Carl and Father Cameron into St. Giles so that little Gil can take advantage of the fair.

'Are you sure you won't come?' asks Father Cameron of Mia and Persis.

'Are you mad?' says Mia, 'have you forgotten what lengths I'll take to avoid St. Giles during the fair?'

'Like Kensington Market only worse,' says Persis to Ken when she tries to articulate the numerous reasons she has no desire to be swallowed by the masses of excitable fair-goers that have taken over St. Giles.

'But you _liked_ Kensington Market,' protests Ken.

'Only when it was quiet. Think of Eatons' at Christmas.'

'Oh,' says Ken, brought up short and quite seeing his sister's point. 'I suppose…as I've promised Gil…' He looks longingly at the Royal Albert and its ritual trappings, laid out in state on the coffee table of the Glover parlour, envious suddenly of the quiet afternoon the women will share.

'You can't very well get out of the outing now, no,' says Persis with a smile in her voice. 'You can tell us all about it later.'

They do; Gil exuberantly, brandishing a stick of rock candy in one and a plush giraffe in the other, Father Cameron chattily as he regales them with a list of the people he ran across to talk to, Ken with all the clever observation expected of a writer, so that in the end Mia is provoked to asking, 'did you join them in _any_ of it, or only watch what was going on, Ken?'

It is almost like being in company with Nina again, Ken thinks, as he watches those hazel eyes flash into life and realising suddenly why Persis and her neighbour get on as well as they do.

'Oh well, the carousel was rather good, wasn't it, Gil?' he says and neither Persis nor Mia succeeds in failing to laugh.

Other days they walk in the botanic gardens, Carl regaling them with the Latin names of the plants to little Gil's bemusement, giving half an eye to the bees and butterflies that float among the flowers there. He tries to give more attention to these things and gives it up as a bad job when Persis's hand at his elbow alerts him to the presence of an aspen he has missed for looking.

'It was hiding from me,' he says, 'trees shouldn't jump out at a fellow with no notice, especially not from the right if they know he can't see on that side. Isn't that right Gil?'

Gil burbles agreement and leaves the path to explore a cluster of hollyhocks. One memorable afternoon they go out on the river; Ken attempting to maneuver a boat for his sister and son, Father Cameron good-naturedly rediscovering the fine art of wielding a punting pole for Mia and Carl, and with rather better success than Ken Ford.

'What do you think?' asks Father Cameron of his passengers, 'shall we race?'

'Not on your life,' says Persis from across the water, 'not unless Ken puts that thing aside and lets me help at rowing.'

'I'm doing well,' Ken says indignantly. 'Tell aunt Persis I'm doing well, Gil. She'll believe you.'

'Yes!' says Gil excitedly, 'really well! We only almost fell in _three_ times,' and he claps his hands delightedly.

When inevitably the visit draws to a close, Persis finds Ken out, arms full of newly ironed clothes and any number of small packages.

'You didn't have to do any of than, Butterfly,' he says. He is sitting in the spare room staring meditatively at a case he has not filled because Symp has taken it for a sunny bed set out specially for him and gone to sleep in it.

'I wanted to –and it's not all for you. There are Christmas gifts in there to give the others. You will remember, won't you? If I send them with you it saves us the postage and you the risk of a customs fee.'

'I'll try to, anyway,' says Ken.

'You'd better, or I shall ask Gil to remind you.'

'All right, all right, I'll remember!' Ken says, holding up his hands in surrender. 'Scout's honour I will, Butterfly,' and he raises her a two-fingered salute. 'Only don't tell Gil, or we shall have to hold Christmas in September to stop him dying of anticipation.'

Persis laughs, and begins to take over the packing; Ken debates protesting and decides against it.

'We'll miss having you here,' says Persis as she shoos Symp out of his adopted resting place. There is dismayed mewling followed by a wide-eyed look that transforms his owlish face into one that has experienced devastating betrayal.

'We're sorry to be going,' says Ken. 'We'll have to come again. Ideally with Nora and the baby. But it's your turn next. Promise?'

'We'll certainly try,' says Persis, and Ken has to be content with that.


	8. Chapter 8

_As ever, thank you for reading and/or reviewing. Your taking the time to do these things is always appreciated._

* * *

'There's a Christmas treat for you,' says Persis to Mia as they dry the crockery following the agape hour at Mary Magdalene. Somewhere between her arrival in late March, and this the first Sunday of Advent, Persis has been recruited onto the Refreshments committee by Mrs. Dogget.

'Oh?' says Mia, 'tell me, or can't I know?'

'No, I think you'd better –these came in the post from Nina.' Persis produces from her pocket a string of tickets for the Royal Opera's _Hansel and Gretel_.

'I would so like to,' says Mia, 'but I can't –someone would have to sit with mother. She's ever so difficult about being left alone in cold weather, in case of 'flu you know, and the trains being delayed.'

'Ah, well we've thought of that,' says the lilting voice of Father Cameron from the kitchen door.

'I thought you'd gone?' says Mia, turning round in confusion, soapy water dripping from her wrists.

'And leave you two to make your own way back along the high? I never could.' His eyes twinkle warmly in the light of the church kitchen.

'Now, about this opera you're going to hear with Carl and Persis –no, listen, you _are_ because I will sit up with your mother –'

'Father Cameron you mustn't –you'll be wanting to hear the music yourself.'

'Ah but I am, my dear, I am,' and his eyes flash merrily. 'I'm going up to hear it at the holiday. My Christmas treat to myself, if you like. Well, I've not had one in…well not since the three choirs festival, I believe. Yes, Gloucester and _The Evening Watch_ – but months too long ago now. Marvellous, by the way. Did you catch it when it went to broadcast?'

Mia opens her mouth to protest, not quite daring to articulate fully the tyranny of her mother, and finds herself acknowledging –absurdly –that she had in fact managed to hear Holst's _Evening Watch_ , though she skirts over the fact that it was punctuated in her house by her mother's acerbic commentary on new and supposedly innovative music. Perhaps Fr. Cameron divines this in any event because the next moment the former priest holds up his hands as though in benediction.

'There now,' he says, 'you see it's no good arguing. You must allow for treats sometimes, you know. Besides, we've all been quite conspiring –and enjoying it _enormously_ I might add –to come up with this one. You just go along to London on the Friday and listen carefully. I'm expecting a full report when you come back.'

'But I thought you were going yourself?'

'Well, but I'd not mind knowing what to listen for ahead. Do me a favour, won't you and take detailed notes? There's a good girl –and for goodness sake enjoy yourself!'

He disappears back into the sanctuary before either young woman can say anything.

'I suppose I shall have to go,' says Mia with affected resignation to Persis, as she turns back to the sink, 'since you are all so determined to make me.'

London in Advent is a spectacle. It is not like Canada, there are no downy blankets of snow, but everywhere that can be is twined with evergreen and ribbons. The displays in the shop windows are positively theatrical in their extravagance. Covent Garden, when Carl, Persis and Mia finally arrive there is no exception. Music comes billowing from it in glad waves, beckoning people in out of the cold of the market, an invitation only too gladly accepted by its devotees. Once there was a war here and this city knew it; now it is determined to make its citizens forget.

By and large, the effort is a success. Arriving early, they find a vacant and elaborate card-table where it is possible to nurse cups of cocoa and watch the arrival of fellow matinee attendees. Many of these prove to be families arrayed in Sunday best, with young and eager-eyed children in tow. One of these, a bright-eyed youth in a handsome navy duffle coat, careens dangerously about the tea-room as he turns his young sister in a madcap waltz, and puts Persis in mind of a young Stuart Ross. The same thought evidently strikes Carl, because he grins as the waltzer narrowly dodges a nearby table and says as he stirs his cocoa, 'why have we never managed this before now? We ought to make a habit of it.'

Swept along by the impulse of the moment and the grandeur of the outing, even Mia is inclined to agree. To do this more often, to become familiar with the ritual and the elaborate ceremony of this world and its citizens would be a luxury indeed, one that stands in stark constrast to their more ordinary Oxford pursuits.

 _Hansel and Gretel_ is ideally suited to the season. The simplicity of the music and its fairytale origins are full of the flavour of anticipation and excitement that has suffused the city. In Nina's capable hands Gretel comes alive and is positively playful in her interaction with the mezzo-soprano singing Hansel. She sews with exaggerated diligence in the opening scene, and Persis remembering how much trouble sewing has always given her friend, has to suppress her laughter. The next moment the sewing is abandoned and Nina is leaping from chairs, whirling about the stage like a dervish, her arms extended in entreaty,

 _Brother dear come dance with me,_

 _Both my hands I offer thee,_

 _Right foot first, left foot then,_

 _Turn around and back again!_

It is nothing grand, but watchg the sheer confidence of the performance, the practiced leaps and spins, it seems to Persis impossible to doubt the success of the spikier _Salome_ in the new year.

Beside her, Mia has made the leap from listening to allowing herself to be caught up in the music, along with the reluctant Hansel. Its colours stretch from gleefully exuberant to pantomimic uneasiness in the witches' ride. At the interval she turns to Persis and says, 'Nina makes a very convincing ten-year-old doesn't she?' and is surprised as Persis to find tears in her friend's eyes.

'It's all right,' says Mia, 'I know this story, they get out of the woods in one piece, I promise, and the gingerbread children come back to life. It's all reassuringly Christian and moralistic.'

'No, I know, it isn't that,' Persis says, almost laughing. 'It's triumphant too, that ending. It's silly, but watching has made me think…the way Nina's playing Gretel...she was like that always before the war. Never really serious abut anything except her music unless you needed her to be. In another life she would hardly have had to act at all, taking on a part like this. I'm so used to her now, elegant and playful and earnest, and with that total dedication to what she does that I'd forgotten, and it's like anything, the remembrance makes the realisation that you've lost something that much worse. It's only come home to me now how much I miss the girl of my French House days, that ability of hers to laugh unconcernedly at life.'

Mia, whose greatest trial came after the war, when she shelved her own life to bring her mother through the Spanish influenza that ravaged the country, cannot think what to say. She looks out at the vastness of the theatre and reaches for words.

It is Carl who says, 'I don't suppose any of us were the same after the war. But we've all gone on living, one way or another, and rebuilding the world the best way we can; that's the important thing. We won't ever have to live through anything so awful ever again.'

Impulsively, superstitiously, both women cross themselves, and it occurs to Carl to wonder what they would do to him if he pointed out that High Anglicanism, like Nina's Londonsims, also appears to be catching. He doesn't quite dare find out.


	9. Chapter 9

_With thanks always to those of you reading and/or reviewing._

* * *

It is a rainy afternoon in the middle of December and the city of Oxford a veritable artist's palate of different greys, its cobbled streets slick and black with the rain that has been falling for what seems days. In fact it has only been one severe and damp Saturday, but pent up in the Glover house with no prospect of escape, it feels like more.

Presiding over the scene is the austere and gaunt spectre of Mrs. Glover, who sits in her wicker chair and barks curt orders at her assistants.

'No,' she is saying presently, 'not _there_ , Amelia, _honestly_. Wasn't I clear enough that I wanted that potted cactus on the windowsill?'

Mia, deftly weaving her way between so much uprooted furniture, makes an exasperated noise and gestures to indicate the multiplicity of windowsills in the room being reconfigured. Persis, looking up from fitting drawer-liners into a massive and ungainly mahogany dresser, sees Mia's eyes flash like twin hazel switches and sends a sympathetic glance her way.

The cause of so much upheaval is the pending arrival of the new curate, one Rev. Cross, formerly of the parish of Barchester.

'I really don't see,' says Mia to her mother as she risks settling the cactus on a south-facing windowsill, 'why this room as it was couldn't have done just as well for the Rev. Cross –about whom we know _nothing_ –as it did for Mr. Hodges of Teddy Hall.'

Nor can anyone else, but Mrs. Glover does not enumerate her reasons. She simply says tersely, ' _St Edmunds_.'

Whatever her logic had been, it had brought a flustered Mia to the door of Silver Moon at a little after ten, where she had stood on the doorstep, hunter tartan shawl pulled protectively over her head against the drizzle, and said in her usual apologetic way, 'I'm ever so sorry to ask, but mother's taken a notion to give the spare room a turn-over, and she wants all sorts of things done, more than I can ever manage and I know it's getting on for tea and a weekend and you've probably other things planned, and I know you have to set the collections soon, and mark them, but I thought I'd just ask if –'

'Of course we'll help,' said Carl gently, taking Mia's elbow and steering her into the house, then installing her at the kitchen table. 'But you're all damp,' he protests as the rain makes a point of darkening the grey of Mia's work dress, ' that's no good at all. Here, sit and have a cup of tea –only a thimble-sized one, it won't take a minute, so stop fretting –and get your breath back, and when you have you can tell us what needs doing. You look like a water-bedraggled moth and will do no one any good if you catch cold.'

'That,' says Persis, half-amused, half-exasperated, 'is Carl-speak for grey suits you, which it does. And for a wonder he's right about you getting dry too. Here,' said Persis firmly, pushing a cast-iron tea bowl brimful of jasmine tea towards Mia. 'Drink that, give me that shawl to dry out by the fire, and stop looking as if you've been handed the moon. It's only what friends do, muck in and help with the overwhelming. Besides, I suspect Carl's as over-anxious to set those collections as the students are to sit them.'

Mia had laughed and only then cautiously picked up her tea bowl, sipped at the contents and began to recount her mother's manifold plans for the reorganisation of the upstairs bedsit.

Now, some hours later, that same bedsit is in mild chaos as furniture is disassembled, reassembled, and shunted from one nook to another and out of this corner and into that. Carl proves a valuable asset, partially-sighted or not; left to her own devises even capable Mia could not have coaxed the stiff bolts in the brass bedstead into cooperation, nor could she have moved it across the room.

Serenely in its midst and without a qualm for the imposition she is making on her neighbours, is Mrs. Glover, about whom Persis has heard so much but never before met. She is not sure that it is an acquaintanceship she will be looking to renew, Mia's mother or not.

'Oughtn't that washstand be further to the left?' that woman asks now.

Mia opens her mouth to acquiesce and Persis can bear no more.

'No,' she says, 'like that it's agreeing with the principles of balance that make a room work; move it and the room will go out of symmetry.'

'You know all about it, I suppose?' asks Mrs. Glover curtly.

'Oh yes,' says Carl, 'Persis has a great eye for arranging things. She's always looking at things as if to draw them. I'd listen, if I were you.'

Mia, finding herself dangerously close to laughing in relief and gratitude, smothers her laughter by burying her face in her hands and affecting to succumb to a coughing fit.

Mrs. Glover mutters darkly about these modern women, among whom she most certainly and distressingly counts her daughter, and turning to Mia, says sternly, 'you're not getting ill, are you Amelia? You want to be careful if you are. You know how these little things turn into grave illnesses overnight. What is it? A head cold?'

'No,' says Mia, leaning on the windowsill and gasping to recover her normal rate of breathing, 'no, nothing like that –only the dust I think. Is that –it is –what on _earth_ is Fr. Cameron doing coming up the walk?'

'Well don't keep the priest _waiting_ ,' says Mrs. Glover sharply, but belatedly; Mia has already flown out of the room, somehow circumnavigating an occasion table, a stranded writing desk, a marooned gas-ring and a rolled up Persian rug to say nothing of various vases in the process.

'I've come to join the ranks and lend support,' says a silvery voice from the doorway some minutes later.

'Ah, Persis dear, Carl, Mrs. Glover, lovely to see you. I had it from Father Martin that the curate would be here for St. Stephen's day –and thought I'd just look in and see if you needed anything. And I wanted to bring you this.' He takes from inside his coat a smallish parcel wrapped in brown paper and places it in Mrs. Glover's hands.

'From Greece,' he says, 'I had it from the monks on Athos, _Theotokos_ they called it, exquisite handiwork really, of Mary naturally, holding the Christ. Only a very little thing, you know, to make the fellow feel at home, not that I doubt you'll do that yourself. Do we know anything about him?'

'You're never saying there's someone you've not met, Father Cameron?' says Persis laughingly as she stuffs pillows into pillowcases and sets them on the bed.

'Ah but my dear, there are a good many people I don't know. Now, who can tell me about our curate?'

'I should think you know most about him of all of us,' says Mia, 'here, let me help with that eiderdown Persis –they're such awkward things.'

'Nothing awkward about an eiderdown,' says Mrs. Glover.

' _Years_ since she's tried to put a cover on one,' murmurs Mia mischievously in Persis's ear, eyes flashing dangerously. The intervention of Father Cameron has raised her spirits and roused the wickedly clever girl of her St. Hilda's days. To prevent Mrs. Glover's realisation of this fact, she vents her feelings in chattery whispered asides to Persis and vigorously plumping the pillows, quite ignoring her mother's injunction to 'mind –you'll drive all the feathers out of them that way. Come away and see about moving that writing desk, can't you?'

'Ah,' says Father Cameron, 'Carl and I had better do that, I think. Heavy, don't you know, all that panelled oak. Remind me where it came from? _Really_? –but yes, of course, you did tell me before. No, Mia my dear,' seeing Mia on her way to obeying her mother and bent on preventing him being useful, 'I can quite manage, thank you. I might be getting on, but I'm not quite so old and useless as to stand by and let a young lady do all the work. Only when I'm actively dying, my dear, will that happen. It's quite against the rules I was brought up on, you know it is. No, don't argue. I'll tell you what you _can_ do, go down to the kitchen and make up a tea tray; we'll want one when we've done this. Persis, you go with her, see she does it; don't let her do anything else; I have it on good authority she spent all of yesterday afternoon polishing the silver for us at Mary Magdalene, and with the morning you seem to have had, I reckon that's quite enough for a body to be getting on with.'

'You never _did_ tell us about the curate,' says Mia, 'you were going to, you know.'

'Was I?' asks a bemused Father Cameron. 'Now that seems _very_ odd. Very odd indeed. It was the vestry that chose him, you know, and I only know what they tell me.'

'The vestry tell him everything,' breaths Mia in Persis's ear.

'I heard that,' says Father Cameron, 'and perhaps they do. You get on with that tea, we'll tend to the writing desk, and this occasion table –however _did_ you place that bookshelf – and when you've come back I'll see what I can't conjure about this curate.'

Mia crosses her arms and turns on her heel with affected exasperation, but collapses against the wall of the stair once she and Persis are safely away from the spare room.

'Oh bless him,' says Mia through her laughter, 'a thousand times bless him. No one else,' and she lays a hand on her heart, 'no one else can manage mother the way he can. No one else _dares_.'

They are waiting on the kettle to boil when there comes a gentle rap on the front door.

'You go,' says Persis, 'I don't mind seeing to this,' she gestures at the Royal Albert spread out like an army on the silver tea tray, and the kettle bubbling away on the hob.

'Are you sure?' asks Mia uncertainly.

'Perfectly. You go, I'll manage. Don't you trust me to warm the teapot? Or do you think I won't let the water come to a full boil?'

'You make excellent tea,' says Mia, touching a nervous hand to her hair, which has become fly-away after a morning shifting furniture, 'much better than mine, and you know it. If you're sure you don't mind…' there is another soft knock on the door.

' _Go,_ ' says Persis, fairly shoving Mia out of her own kitchen.

Over the gentle boiling of the kettle there comes back to Persis the sound of a man's voice touched with apology and a hint of Estuary English that he hasn't quite succeeded at losing, though he has evidently made the effort.

'Hello,' he is saying, 'are you Miss Glover?'

Mia's protestation is lost over the rising whistle of the kettle. By the time Persis has begun to gently warm the teapot the man at the door is saying, 'I'm ever so sorry for the inconvenience –I'm afraid I've come to you rather earlier than we agreed, only –'

'No,' says Mia, evidently trying not to sound harried, and Persis can picture the way she must be worrying her hands, or else the sleeves of her dress, 'no that's quite all right –look, we're all in a bit of confusion at the moment –we've just been putting things in order….if you…if you…we were about to have tea. Come into the drawing room will you, and sit down and I'll see if I can fetch mother –there are one or two others too…they've been helping, shall I –'

'No,' says the voice of the man Persis by now has taken to be Rev. Cross, formerly of Barchester, 'no, I'll take that, it's quite all right. I can see to the door too, you go ahead Miss. Glover, I _am_ sorry…' his nervousness makes his vowels short and flat and the Estuary accent becomes more evident than ever.

'It's all right, really it is,' says Mia, and darts into the sanctity of the kitchen.

'Mother will never forgive me,' says Mia in a murmur, coming and surveying the Royal Albert in its bone china splendour of curlicued handles and old country roses. She braces herself against the kitchen counter and does not, as far as Persis can work out, draw fresh breath before rushing perilously on to ask, 'how are you getting on?' as if the evidence of the majestic china laid ready were not confirmation enough.

'Tea for you,' says Persis. She nods at the elegant, even noble teapot and says in elaboration,' Assam. It seemed safest. There's hot water, and hot and cold milk too –and sugar on the off-chance it's wanted.'

She hands the tea service to a pink-cheeked Mia, and adds reassuringly, 'there is no _earthly_ way she can make this your fault.'

'Oh there is,' says Mia grimly resigned as the Royal Albert chatters noisily on her arm, 'there is. You've only met her the once –thank goodness.'

'I have every confidence he won't let her do that,' says Persis. 'He's almost as apologetic as you are, and that takes doing. You take that into the drawing room; I'll fetch the others. It must be cold out, is it?'

'Cold?' asks Mia blankly.

'Well it won't be the rain that turned you that colour, you were nearly white with damp when you came to us this morning, not rose-coloured –no, don't do anything about it, it suits you. Go on, you take that through –'

'But I must tell mother,' protests Mia, shifting the tea tray so that it balances against her hip and causing the Royal Albert to chatter more volubly than ever.

'I've told you,' says Persis, wanting to laugh and suppressing the urge, 'I'll do that. I've survived a morning with her, haven't I?'

'You should never have had to. I'm so sorry.'

'She's our neighbour too,' says Persis, a smile in her voice, 'we were doomed to meet her eventually. And I hear so much about her –'

Here Mia breaks through with a fresh flurry of apology that Persis, unencumbered by the tea tray has the luxury of waving away with a hand.

'I was curious,' she says, the smile spreading to her eyes, and even coming to rest lightly on her lips. 'And when it comes to the point, we've both survived the encounter.'

Mia hums uncertain agreement. _Yes, I know,_ says the look on her face, _but that's not at all the point_.

'It isn't you I'm worried about especially,' says Mia, with the briefest of glances in the direction of the drawing room and the waiting curate.

'I never _did_ worry about you, if it comes to that. You'd learned to hold your own against Susan Baker.'

'You've never met her.'

'No, but then you didn't have to meet mother to know she was formidable either. Sometimes our circulated gossip really is enough.' Mia smiles and the Royal Albert still islanded on the silver tea tray chatters its ascent.

There is perhaps, Persis thinks, something in this. Mrs. Glover appears to thrive on apology, and she ahs just been handed another expert practitioner of the art, though she does not yet know it.

She comes and stands behind Mia, setting her hands on her friend's shoulders. 'You'll smooth over the worst of it,' says Persis, 'you always do. And there's Carl and Fr. Cameron and me to help if need be, though I shouldn't think it will come to that. And as for the rest,' Persis shrugs. 'We've done most of what needs doing. It's only that rug to lay out and a handful of impedimenta, and odds are he'll want to move some of that about anyway. Hasn't he _said_ he knows he's come at an awkward moment? Now take that through while it's still hot enough to drink.'

'Yes, yes all right,' says Mia reluctantly, 'only –only you'd better not be long coming and rescuing me.'

This time Persis does laugh, gently and not at all unkindly. 'I seriously doubt,' she says, giving Mia a push in the direction of kitchen door, 'that you're going to need rescuing.'

Mia goes, throwing a martyred glance over her shoulder, but it is lost on Persis; she has already vanished to summon the others to meet the curate.

* * *

 _Sharp readers -and really that's all of you -will have caught I do not own Barchester. But it felt right to nod to it in a story so full of churches and priests and curates. That said, the curate is all my own._


	10. Chapter 10

_We're back in Toronto for a chapter, so I hope the shift isn't too much of a jar. As ever, thanks in spades for reading and/or reviewing._

* * *

 _We have finally got our curate,_ writes Persis to Nina, early in 1926. _Like every curate we've encountered while travelling, he makes little to no conscious impression on his audience once they've left him. Partly that comes from Glover house; the furniture would stifle even the most animated person, and he is hardly that. The first time I met him he was sitting with great precision on the edge of one of those overwrought and high-backed lion's head chairs that crowd that parlour, trying to look at ease and positively competing with Mia for nerves. She, as it happens, had retreated behind the security of the Royal Albert, which hardly made for a smooth beginning. Mia does a very credible imitation of a college Dean when called upon. I don't think she would have done in this instance except that Mrs. Glover had deigned to join us and was reclining in state on a chaise-lounge, watching her like a hawk. And the more Mrs. Glover watches, I have learned, the more precise and clipped Mia becomes –not for nothing, it turns out was she sent away to some English girls' school in the country for years. She can be brutal in her polish and efficiency._ _Carl said afterwards that had we not been there, and Father Cameron too, he supposed they would have sat in stilted silence punctuated by the noise of the china and Mrs. Glover putting the fear of God into the pair of them, and I'm not convinced he's wrong._

 _Anyway, he is called Victor Cross, has a voice that reads well, though with flat vowels when nerves triumph over Received Pronunciation, and he has been favoured with eyes the colour of green olives and brown hair more unruly even than Stuart's._

'My hair isn't unruly!' says Stuart indignantly.

'Only a little,' Nina mildly answers, reaching across the low coffee table and brushing a sandy curl behind Stuart's ear before he can duck out of her way in time.

'Anyway,' says Nina, 'it doesn't matter; no one on earth can hold a candle to you for sheer cheek.'

Stuart opens his mouth to reply, but before he can summon clever enough words, Nina has resumed reading aloud _…All this dates to mid-December, of course, but we were so at sea, what with reordering what was to be his room, and introducing him to Oxford, that there hasn't been a moment to write and tell you about him before now._

'Introduce him to Oxford!' says Nina half-despairing, half-amused, 'didn't I tell you we'd never get them back? They were new themselves less than a year ago –and Persis was still discernibly Presbyterian then.' She shakes her head and resumes the letter. _By some piece of luck Carl and Father Cameron had just put the finishing touches on that upstairs bedsit when I told them that tea was ready and the new curate had arrived. None of them –least of all Mrs. Glover –quite believed me at first, but they were willing enough to go down to tea and meet him. It was a relief though when finally Mrs. Glover rose up out of that chaise-lounge with much pomp and circumstance, made apologies and said the morning had quite worn her out. I didn't see how –she hadn't done a thing but boss us –but we were all too relieved to contradict her._

 _Everyone softened a bit after that, the curate going so far as to actually lean back into the uncomfortable lion head chair and insist we begin on first-name terms at once. 'Anything else doesn't sound like me,' he said._

 _It wasn't miles away from what Mia had once said to us, and we were ready enough to go along with it. Mia though got that look in her eye that betrays that it wasn't sheer luck that got her through three years at an Oxford college and also that she can in fact be something more than Mrs. Glover's housekeeper when she wants to be and said, 'not until you drop 'Miss Glover.' I was only ever that to the dons at St. Hilda's. It doesn't sound like me either.'_

 _It was a valiant effort but it didn't take, and anyway, given her earlier reserve I have difficulty believing she couldn't hold her own against the Dean of St Hilda's. But as I write this, weeks after the fact, she is still 'Miss Glover' to Victor Cross, and I don't know who is more perplexed by it, Mia, or Carl and I._

 _Since then, away from Mrs. Glover and her absurdity, he has emerged a quiet, reliable and kind person. This last based purely on his treatment of a pigeon that stunned itself flying into his bedroom window. He turned up on our doorstep with it some days after arriving and said meek as ever, would Carl and I mind his hospitalising it at Silver Moon as he didn't imagine Mrs. Glover or her daughter would be in favour of healing ministry for avians. I have an everlasting grudge against the pigeons of Oxford, as they are bold as anything and glory in taunting Symp, but of course I said we'd let him nurse this one back to health at ours if he could do it without providing Symp with lunch. Carl liked him at once for it._

 _'_ _You can take the measure of a fellow's kindness,' he said when Victor –I_ _cannot_ _think of him as Rev. Cross, though Mia seems to manage it –had gone, 'by the way he treats an animal.'_

 _Needless to say, they are now thick as two thieves, debating theology and eking out what insects there are to be had in January. What Boxelder bugs and the doctrine of transubstantiation have in common I leave for you to tell me; Mia and I have tried and still can't find the connection._

'I don't suppose _you_ understand how those two relate?' asks Nina of Stuart Ross. The New Year has brought her back to Toronto, and they sit now in the little parlour off of the kitchen of the house on the corner of Sussex and Huron that once belonged to Nina's aunt.

'Let me look.' Stuart takes the letter, squints at it – asks 'why do women have such impossible handwriting' –and then shrugs elegantly, a fluid gesture he has learned from Nina.

'Dunno,' he says at last, handing the letter back and dodging with an artist's skill the gentle cuff aimed his way for his commentary on Persis's copperplate. He clutches theatrically at his unscathed elbow, provoking Nina to raising her eyebrows.

'Just because they can't fault your singing,' she tells him as she pours out the tea that has been steeping while they processed the news from Oxford, 'does _not_ mean you will never be accused of overacting.'

'I'm only doing what I've been taught,' says Stuart devilishly.

'Not by me you weren't,' says Nina, daring to entrust one of her aunt's glass enamel teacups to Stuart's outsized hands.

'Not on purpose,' concedes Stuart, 'but they do say, don't they, that all sopranos –'

'Have I _ever,_ ' says Nina at once lofty, arch and playful, 'been lumped with 'all sopranos'?'

'Never,' says Stuart solemnly, and for a wonder he is sincere. He bends precariously forward for the milk jug and adds a haphazard measure of milk to his tea.

'That's settled that then. Now tell me; how long do you think it would take to do up a christening shawl?'

'Dunno,' says Stuart again. Then curious, 'anyway, I thought you hated sewing?'

'Dear boy, how curious your remembering that. As it happens I do, very much. Lace knitting though I can bear because it does up quickly, and because it remains one of the few things Auntie _did_ succeed at teaching me that involves a needle, but only just.' She smiles.

Stuart shakes his head; the nuances of sewing and knitting are lost on him.

'Why d'you want to anyway?'

'Shall I read you the rest of this letter and tell you?'

'I thought I was finding the connection between Box-something-or-others and –what was the other thing?'

"Transubstantiation,' says Nina. 'Sometimes Stuart, you would try a saint, and I'm hardly that.'

'I don't see why,' says Stuart, 'I'm only –yes, all right, go on, of course I want to hear the rest of it. Really. Though for what it's worth, I swear you've been known for saintliness and long-suffering.'

'Only when I sing,' says Nina regally before returning her attention to the letter.

 _You expressed at the close of your last letter a hope that all our wishes would be gratified this year, and it's certainly the season for it. I won't vouch for all of them –I don't think anyone has that sort of luck anymore –but certainly the chief wish has met with resolution. You might write and let me know what Carl and I would have to do to talk you into being godmother to a baby due about Easter. We'd have asked before –at Christmas after the opera –but experience suggested there might be sense in waiting to tell you._

 _I gather from a certain retired priest that the proper thing to wish you in the run-up to_ _Salome_ _is into the mouth of the wolf. That sounds like madness, so know that we have tremendous faith in the production and are sorry to be missing it; we expect a full report well before you're back our side of the water._

'Does that explain at all about the christening shawl?' asks Nina, refolding the letter.

'No,' says Stuart. 'Well, I mean, it does, but I still don't see why you'd do it if you don't really enjoy sewing.'

'Knitting,' says Nina, 'I've told you.' She makes an effort not to laugh and succeeds by taking Stuart's teacup from him and giving her attention over to replenishing it.

'There are many things I'd do for Persis, christening shawls for her children are really the least of them. Liking doesn't come into it.' She returns the teacup to Stuart and attends to her own.

'I always supposed,' says Stuart, considering his tea, 'that after the war we'd go back to doing just as we liked. It hasn't happened at all like that and I have the strangest feeling that most of the time you don't mind.'

As before he adds a generous dollop of milk to his tea. Nina watches him and tries to find the words to explain that what he is describing has nothing to do with the war and everything to do with growing up. When she cannot she says instead, speaking of the milk, 'that will stick in your throat.'

Stuart beams at her. 'It hasn't stopped you,' he says as she mixes a little of the milk into her tea.

'I'm not the one with a voice lesson coming due,' Nina tells him, and now Stuart is laughing. He has never been overmuch concerned about which foods do what to his voice, and he is not about to start, not even in the uncertain January sunlight sitting in the parlour of what is now Nina's Toronto home. She shakes her head, acknowledges the truth of this and concedes that there is perhaps no circumstance under which one can reasonably expect a growing boy to fast.

'You know,' says Nina as an afterthought, 'you needn't take all your cues from me.'

'Oh I don't know,' Stuart says, helping himself to a sweet like fudge –'red cow sweets' he used to call them as a little boy because of their wrappers – 'I can't think of anyone better to parrot.'

'You needn't parrot anyone,' says Nina, succeeding this time at rapping his knee sharply with the corner of the letter from Oxford, 'and you needn't talk to me the way you do to the young conservatory sopranos whose hearts you mangle.'

'Who says I mangle them?' asks Stuart glibly. Getting no answer he helps himself to another of the red cow sweets and he invokes not the ghost of his former teacher, but Persis's brother.

'It's only what Ken used to do,' he says.

'No,' says Nina, 'not to me. That's one thing Ken never dared try, and why we got on so well; he had the good manners to know when he oughtn't risk breaking anyone's heart.'

'Who says that's what I was angling for?' Stuart wants to know.

'Dear boy,' murmurs Nina, sounding at once affectionate and absent, 'this won't do, you know it won't.'

'You still think I'll wake up some morning and change my mind,' says Stuart as he folds the candy wrapper into a neat square, and the words betray the accusation he has been trying not to make of her as he rests his elbows on his knees, his chin on his cupped hands and looks at her fixedly. Somewhere on the table the folds of the wrapper unravel and it springs up like a paper jack-in-the-box.

'I know you will,' says Nina patiently, and she begins gently, easily, serenely, to hum the Marschallin's line in that most celebrated of trios.

'How can you know?' asks Stuart, and now he is not accusing, only playful, bright-eyed as ever and perhaps a little curious. He considers, then plucks and begins to unwrap another sweet.

It might be early January and the time-honoured calendrical marker for new beginnings, but at eleven in the morning, with the sunlight playing on the snowdrifts, it is still too early to talk of anything so complicated as feelings. Nina spares a thought for the retired Father Cameron and Mia Glover, both of Oxford, and smiles as she fails to answer this question; the habits of England are indeed catching.

She says instead, 'dear boy,' ever gentle and soft, and then as she turns the conversation, 'tell me about the music they're making you learn.'

In the house at the corner of Sussex and Huron, Stuart unbends and relents with a good grace. That he remains unconvinced Nina sees in the sparkle of his eyes; she has done no more than temporarily divert him, and after all, she has known she could never manage more than that. Stuart chatters on about his music, what he is learning, what he wishes to learn, becomes her pupil again long enough to ask her opinion. Nina gives it, and as she does so stops once and for all trying to talk him out of fascination and into sense, consciously now leaving the victory to time.


	11. Chapter 11

_Thank you as ever for the time you take in reading and/or reviewing. I know how busy things get and that you have the time for either is always appreciated._

* * *

February brings that rare thing –a letter from Ken –to Oxford. It is written in his overlarge handwriting, the myriad blots and accidental dashes a testament to the fact that a typewriter has well and truly spoiled him for the use of a fountain pen.

'Are you sure he wasn't writing on blotting paper?' asks Carl when he sees the letter unfolded. He is spoiled by the impeccable neatness of the wafer-thin paper Una writes her letters on –they both are –and by the crisp medicinal white of Faith's epistles. Persis says so.

'Yes,' begins Carl, and then seeing the new curate coming up the garden walk, calls out the window, 'Victor, come here and tell Persis that at the very least the man who wrote this was left-handed, or trying to be.'

'Do they allow that sort of thing in Canada?' asks Victor with interest, coming and looking over Carl's shoulder at the much-abused letter.

'No,' say both Carl and Persis at once.

Victor shrugs and shakes his head. 'Shame,' he says more to himself than to them. He had begun that way himself, he remembers, only to be resolutely and severely corrected by the overwhelming combination of his mother and the head teacher responsible for his infant's class at the local school in Colchester. 'Someone ought to, really,' he says as he bends to inspect Ken's letter.

'No worse than the notes for my sermons,' is Victor's sanguine conclusion, once he has blinked away the shock of the blots and dashes.

'Or the notes Carl takes on the life-cycles of Boxelder bugs, though he'll never say so,' says Persis, disappearing and reappearing from the kitchen with one of the cast-iron teabowls with the coiled enamel dragons. Victor accepts the teabowl, contemplates it, reflects on the protracted walk he's had back from the parish of Crampton Hodnet without his gloves, and decides that on this occasion his hands are so cold that even if they are scalded it will probably do them more good than harm. He has been in Oxford a month now and though he has developed the beginnings of a friendship with the Glovers' neighbours, he has yet to learn the secret to drinking from the cast-iron teabowls without burning his hands.

'You do make my father's old invented shorthand look positively logical sometimes, you know,' Persis is saying to Carl when Victor comes back to the present.

'No,' says Carl, 'I wouldn't. I think you must be the only person alive who's seen one of your father's books prior to publication. Pour me more tea too?'

Persis does.

'Well,' Victor says, as tea is poured out, 'what's it say? Or are you just dissecting the handwriting?'

This earns him a smile form Persis. 'I couldn't hope to tell you,' she says, 'Carl's only just finished establishing Ken wasn't trying for Morse code after all.'

 _I have just had the dreadful realisation,_ runs Ken's letter _that it is now a year since you left for Oxford. Una said ominously at the time that we would never see you again and I did my best to doubt this, but as of this morning I'm beginning to think she's right. A whole year, Butterfly –think of it! The whole point of me coming back from the war and not getting myself killed in the process was that we'd be in the same country again, and calling round to see each other as and when we liked. I should here say that I see Nina with more regularity than I do you in an effort to make some kind of point, but that would be outrageously untrue, and she'd disabuse you in a minute of any such notion, so I won't say quite that. We've been in Toronto ever since the end of September, and only now are we finally overlapping with her. Before that of course, while I wrote for_ _Glen Notes_ _we were hardly in Toronto, and whenever we were, she seemed to be tied up holding London in thrall to her music._

 _You know all that though; I didn't write to grumble at you, and I don't mean to. In fact, I'm completely unjustified in grousing because the whole point of penning this letter to you was to convey rather good news_ …

'No one,' says Persis wryly, 'does understatements quite the way Ken does.'

'What do you mean?' asks Carl, interest piqued.

'You read it,' and Persis hands him the letter.

'I can't, can I? I wasn't trained on Owen Ford's invented shorthand. Go on and let us in on whatever the secret is.'

 _…_ _That is,_ Persis reads, picking the letter up where she had left off, _that this morning has seen the arrival of a brother for Gil and Nora. We have called him Owen Matthew, for dad of course and also for the grandfather Rilla's family never got to know. Susan Baker is already saying it is a name that will wear well in the washing, though Rilla is doubtful his ears will satisfy her. I should say I'm inclined to disagree -out of fatherly pride if nothing else - but I know for a fact that no baby since Jim has had ears to please Susan, so tend to take Rilla's part. Aunt Anne is immeasurably pleased at having Matthew remembered; her eyes went all starry and she said over and over, 'oh he'd be so glad, and pleased, and proud.'_

'Oh the _dolt_!' says Persis, shaking her head, half amused, half exasperated. 'I shall kill him. Come to that, so will mother.'

'I was just thinking that last bit sounded rather thoughtful. What's he done now?' asks Carl, then gleefully, 'not broken another ankle in a football game?'

'He might as well have done, it's about as silly. Here, listen.

 _…_ _I still don't think cameras a healthy thing to have near babies when they're so small, which is why, in spite of mother's protestations, there mayn't be any pictures to send you for some time yet._

 _I don't suppose I'll get off away without a description, seeing as there isn't a picture to send. I ought really to leave that sort of thing to Rilla, or at the very least to Una, or someone with a knack for describing children, Aunt Anne possibly, or Nan, but I'll do my best. He's a jolly baby; Nora has already taken him for a kind of human doll she can make a fuss of, and a good thing too, because I think actually delivering him went hard on Rilla. She's been asleep or nearly ever since._

 _Popular opinion says he looks like me. I don't see it much, but I suppose I wouldn't. The fuzz on his head is very dark, anyway, to Aunt Anne's relief, and his eyes blue –but the doctors in our connection say that nothing is half so unreliable as a baby's eye-colour, so I shouldn't think that counts for much. The thing that makes him Owen though, more than anyone else, not even the great and noble (and unheard of) ancestors of Ford, Blythe and West, is a great strawberry mark all down the left side of his face._

 _Rilla's anxious about it, but I've said it gives him colour, and the doctor says he's perfectly healthy, so I'm satisfied. Though I will say it's landed him a score of names already. Nora and Gil have decided it is just the red of strawberries, and so between them and mother he has been our Strawberry Boy for several hours. I quite like this, but it's beginning to strike mother that we cannot call him this in company (why not, Butterfly, does that logic make sense to you? You always did manners rather better than me.) so she is beginning by degrees to call him her sunkissed-boy instead. It's quite as apt, but I like the strawberry image better. It doesn't make me think so much of the war and the hours we spent under the glare of the sun. Not that I can tell that to mother. It strikes me belatedly I oughtn't have said to you, but the other reason I got out of this war alive was so that we could revert to telling each other everything again, and that's part of everything._

 _Apologies for the lack of pictures, and no promises that they will follow shortly, but I daresay it's quite as mad as some of your superstitions –I'm 'minded of a story of mother's about a candle that lived at our front window every evening during the war from something like 1916 onward. That was well after I'd gone abroad, so it wasn't me you took such trouble over._

 _Best wishes always, and with a thought or two spare for your Oxford collection,_

 _Ken_

'Well,' says Carl, helping all of them to further tea, 'that _is_ something. You might even say it's rather good news.'

'Only Ken,' says Persis, and shakes her golden-haired head. 'And there's not so much as a sketch, so we're left at the mercy of speculation until further notice as to what small Owen looks like.'

'Just as well,' Carl says, 'none of them can equal you at sketches. What _is_ a nuisance is the lack of a photo. I can't picture Ken with a strawberry mark at all. What age do you reckon he'll relent about the pictures?'

'He won't,' says Persis mildly, 'someone –mother probably, or aunt Anne –will overrule him. Nina will be furious with him for it. If they can't make him sensible, she will. Victor, where have you been that your hands are still as purple as they were when you came in?'

Victor looks down at his hands, wrapped gingerly around his teabowl and tells them about walking to Crampton Hodnet and back.

' _Where_?' ask Carl and Persis together.

'Parish further north,' says Victor, holding his empurpled hands over the rising steam of the tea. 'They didn't say when I took on the curacy that I'd have to visit out that way sometimes.'

'There's always something that gets forgotten,' says Carl mildly. 'At Keble it was the dratted illegibility of the students' writing. It's well-nigh impossible to read.'

'It's no one's fault really. It was Father Martin's idea, seeing as so few people actually _live_ in the parish.'

'Really?' asks Persis.

'Well, except Father Martin,' concedes Victor, 'and I think Merton College might be part of it too. The rest of it's all gone to shops, so there's really no one in our catch-area to visit and practice applying pastoral care.'

'I should have thought living with Mrs. Glover answered that,' says Carl companionably, ' _and_ been an exercise in tolerance and loving one's neighbour, and any number of other Christian virtues besides, all at once. There's a lot to be said for Mrs. Glover.'

'Was the idea you go without gloves a pre-emptive Lenten penance?' asks Persis, ignoring Carl, as Victor rubs his hands and risks picking his teabowl up.

'No,' he says over the tea, 'no, Miss Glover took them in to mend for me, and she's been so busy with looking after Mrs. Glover –she's come down with 'flu I think, something awkward for her anyway – that I suppose she hasn't had the time. I didn't like to press her.'

'She's not cured you of calling her that then,' says Carl.

Victor makes no answer, he nurses his cup of tea and his hands begin to thaw.

'Leave him alone,' says Persis. 'It's not as if Mia's made much of a habit of his name either. Mrs. Glover has always got 'flu Victor, in the event you've not already noticed. It tends to get worse when she suspects Mia of having her own projects waiting in the wings for her –see further the incident of your gloves. Haven't you another pair to wear in the meantime?'

'Not ones that could be worn to call on people,' says Victor amicably.

Carl considers this. 'IM surprised you've not been overrun with an influx of gloves knotted by parishioners , here and at Crampton Hodnet too.'

'Is it gloves they do here?' asks Victor, 'it was socks at the last parish I worked in.'

Persis says that to hear Fr. Martin –presiding priest of Mary Magdalene –talk, it is scarves and asks how Victor is coming to like Oxford.

'Paucity of gloves aside,' she says.

Victor's eyes crease in amusement and he says over his tea, 'it's beginning to feel like mine. Miss Glover caught me up on much of what has been happening over tea not so long ago, and that helped a good deal.'

'Oh?' asks Carl, interested.

'Was this before or after her mother contracted 'flu?' Persis wants to know, succeeding rather better than Carl at veiling her curiosity.

'Before, I should think. Mrs. Glover had gone out, if memory serves, something to do with organising one of the rotas, or I don't suppose Miss Glover would have had the time.'

'It wouldn't have been possible, you mean,' says Carl.

'I suppose this was when you acquiesced about the gloves?' says Persis.

'Something like that, it was her suggestion I mean, or I shouldn't have agreed. That is I wouldn't have asked if…'his confusion gets the better of him and Victor stops altogether.

'No, of course,' says Persis before Carl's teasing can surface again. 'It's like Mia to offer. She's that rarity who's good at sewing and enjoys it, one assumes because she can do it peaceably and without the interference of her mother.'

'I wouldn't like to say,' says Victor, looking studiously at the tabletop and beginning absentmindedly to trace a pattern around its edge.

'You must stop me,' he says suddenly, 'if I'm telling you things you already know. I fancy you see rather more of Miss Glover than I do.'

'I find that remarkably unlikely,' says Persis and smiles. 'Mrs. Glover's taken care to ensure that at the moment she has no time for anyone else. Besides, if I knew the answers I wouldn't ask. Mia's got a great knack for chatting away about others and not volunteering much about herself.'

'Not like anyone else I know then,' says Carl, eyes shining and turning his head to look affectionately at Persis.

'But I expect you noticed that yourself,' says Persis without any reference to Carl to indicate she has heard him.

'I had noticed,' is the curate's curiously conscious concession. 'I think hers is the only history I've not learned by now.'

'Then you must try and get her to tell you,' says Carl, 'see if you can contrive tea again.'

'You'd do better to ask Fr. Cameron,' says Persis. 'She'll sell herself short, if you leave the narrative to her. Mia's much cleverer than she chooses to let on.'

Victor Cross accepts another steaming thimbleful of tea and says, with the return of that heightened awareness of earlier that he had noticed that much at least. It is by no means everyone, he says, who understands from stray bits of well-remembered liturgy the difference between consubstantiation and its more catholic equivalent.

When at length Victor rises to go, Carl detains him long enough to scrabble around in a basket precariously perched on a high shelf of the hall closet to unearth a pair of gloves.

'Until Mia has half a minute to see to yours,' he says, handing them over. 'Canadians always have a surplus. Nine months of winter you know.' The grin he gives Victor is contagious and the curate ends by returning it and accepting the gloves.

'Warm but damp,' he says of his former parish as he stuffs his hands into the wool lining of the gloves. 'Thank you. I'll see you get them back.'

He disappears down the walk and Persis turns her attention back to Ken's letter, as though attempting to distill further clues from its blotchiness. Carl hovers in the window meditatively.

'Do you know,' he says thoughtfully, as the shape of Victor Cross is swallowed by the mass of the Glover house, 'I'm suddenly terribly glad you never had Mia's preoccupation with Form.'

'Nor you so much reserve,' says Persis indulgently. 'Form and manners aren't all on her side, you realise.'

'No, of course,' says Carl, drumming his fingers against the windowsill. 'Do you suppose,' he asks abstractedly, 'that it will come to anything?'

By then though Persis's attention has been reclaimed by the letter and she is preoccupied in constructing a mental picture of the nephew she hasn't seen, or so it seems to Carl. Either she cannot or does not answer; Carl can't quite decide which.


	12. Chapter 12

_With thanks to all of you who read and/or review._

* * *

No one is sure who browbeats Ken into submission on the matter of baby-photos of Owen, but the first one arrives care of a letter from Nina, depicting a sunny, smiling boy with Ken's hair, mischievous eyes, and as Ken has said, a mark all down the side of his face rendered grey by the photograph. In long after years Ken will be glad of the photos, but they have no way of knowing that then. In this image he is looking up at the camera from the safe haven of his grandmother Leslie's knee, framed on either side by Gil and Nora.

'He _does_ look like Ken,' Mia says as she examines the photo, 'much more than either of the others. What does Nina say?'

Finally, after weeks of being holed up at the Glover house waiting on a protracted bout of her mother's 'flu, Mia has managed to snatch an afternoon away, and cannot bring herself to apologise to her neighbours for spending it at their house sharing tea and gossip; they are too obviously glad to see her.

'It's a lot of Toronto news,' says Persis, handing the letter to Mia, 'I don't suppose most of it will mean much to you. It hardly means anything to _me_ and I used to live there. The thing that sticks is Stuart's increasing fascination with Nina. She never says it outright, but it's there all the same.'

'This story of hers about him finding his way into the back of Massey Hall?' asks Mia curiously, reaching the relevant point in the letter.

'That's the one. He's always doing things like that, of course, it's Stuart to a tee…but even so, if it were anyone else, I suppose I'd be telling her to take care. But it's Nina, and she's always taken exquisite care of little Stuart Ross.'

 _We're getting to the end of_ _Salome_ _,_ Nina has written, _and Stuart finally had an evening going spare. What he does with them I don't know, and I'm not altogether sure I want to; if I were guessing it's when he sets about breaking the hearts of the conservatory sopranos, though I have every confidence he's just as capable of doing that in the daytime. I never used to think he_ _meant_ _it when he said he wanted to take after Ken –did you?_

 _In any event, either he's run out of hearts to break or he's gone temporarily off the sport, because he descended on_ _me_ _at half six the other evening._

 _He'd come out with your parents, or was supposed to have done. I think he must have left them waiting like normal people in the entrance anticipating the performance. If I'm right, the blessing is really that they know Stuart and would be surprised at his doing anything less. I didn't bother to ask how he'd found his way into the wings this time; he's had his share of performances here with the conservatory now and could probably find his way in his sleep._

 _He was so good and nearly normal –well normal for Stuart –that I was beginning to wonder if he was quite himself. All doubt vanished when I finally tried sending him away._

 _'_ _Give me a kiss first,' he said, 'for luck you know.'_

 _He didn't learn that superstition from me, which confirms my idea –if it needed confirming –that he shall be the memory so many future Michaelas and Normas take inspiration from when the music makes them sing of abandonment and heartbreak._

 _'_ _Not until you find yourself singing opposite me,' I said, 'I don't need to tell you that's how that particular wives' tale has gone for time immemorial. It's always been the leading tenor's prerogative.'_

 _All of which is true, and the nice thing about this run of Strauss with Andrew is that he's never thought to invoke it, which is as well as it saves me finding clever reasons to tell him no._

 _'_ _But that means I'll have to learn to sing Strauss on top of everything else,' said Stuart with Stuart-like dramatics._

 _I refrained from saying he wouldn't ever sing Strauss; he hasn't that sort of voice, and he wouldn't find it terribly interesting if he had. More than any other composer, Strauss gives all the best music to the women._

'Do you suppose all of that is true?' asks Mia, laughing over the breezy lightness of the letter.

'I expect so –Nina's always serious about music even when she's pretending not to be. If it is, I'll add that to the ever growing list of reasons I could never do what she does.'

'Nor I,' says Mia.

A sunburst comes through the window and takes in the Maplewood of the table and the gold of Persis's hair as it falls. A moment later a cloud obscures it and the light of the room is diminished, though the scene does not change substancially. Mia and Persis sit with Nina's letter before them, hands coiled round cups of tea and exchange smiles that speak to the quiet gratitude of having gained one of these rare, still and soft moments to themselves, especially after the whirlwind of Mrs. Glover's dramatics and 'flu.

'She seems to have got over it now,' Mia volunteers of her mother.

'Good,' says Persis, 'that's good. Tell me, how is Victor Cross settling –have you had tea with him since that last time?'

'Oh no,' says Mia, sounding and looking startled, 'How did you come to hear of that anyway? It was ages ago.' She begins to twist her tea bowl elaborately between her fingers, the red enamel of the dragon a low swirl of colour as it flashes against and away from her palm.

'He's easier to talk to than the unmusical Mr. Hodges,' says Persis.

'I was forgetting he was likely to have called in on you. Laurence Hodges kept such separate company to mother and me. I shouldn't be at all surprised to learn you've seen more of Rev. Cross than I have. Between weekday Masses and household visits and mother's 'flu, we're far more likely to run across one another at Mary Magdalene than in the house.'

'I see. My memory is that it isn't without the necessary things for making tea, we've even been conscripted to do so on occasion, Mia.'

'Yes,' says Mia doubtfully, 'but the choir vestry never seems the place to suggest tea somehow. And at home I never know quite how to ask. Questions about brasses an purificators, and which surplices need washing are really much simpler…'

'Mia,' says Persis mildly, 'I'm only asking because it was something Carl suggested the last time we had him round here for tea. I wondered if the scheme had ever been realised, that's all.'

'Whatever made Carl think of that?' asks Mia, surprised into ceasing to her efforts with her tea bowl.

'Is it such an egregious idea then?'

'No. No. I only mean he's almost certainly being forever offered cups of tea without my adding to the number.'

'I hardly think he'd mind,' says Persis smiling. 'As offences go, I think that one is likely to be forgivable.' She hesitates a moment, then adds, 'I'm sure you never used to find the offering of tea to people such a complicated thing. You weren't afraid of us when we arrived.'

'No,' says Mia, not looking at Persis. 'It isn't that. I'm not –I mean it isn't at all difficult when it's anyone else,' then very softly and absently to the cast-iron teabowl she is toying with rather than drinking from Mia adds, 'he has such terrible nightmares, Persis.'

In fact Persis is not altogether unaware of this. It had not been so long ago she had woken up late at night –rather early in the morning –to Carl inquiring drowsily of Symp, 'why in the name of goodness d'you reckon the Glover house is lit up like a Victorian Christmas tree?'

'I don't know,' Persis had said, rubbing her eyes and sitting up to look out the window. The Glover house was indeed all lit up –at least a goodly number of the windows seemed to be. 'What time is it?'

Carl infuriatingly had answered with a question of his own. 'Did I wake you? I didn't mean to. I ought to have slept through it really…I could have done once. I seem to be losing the habit of falling asleep under any circumstance.'

'Thank goodness for that,' was Persis's reply; she was becoming more alert the longer she sat up with the quilt wrapped around her, her throat growing cold where her unbuttoned collar exposed it, and Symp kneading at her feet.

'What is it anyway? Burglars?'

'Surely not –advertising their presence like that?' Though Carl admitted blearily as he rubbed sleep from his eyes that his initial thought had been burglars too. 'Should I go over, do you think?' he wondered aloud. 'I was going to, you know, and then I spared a thought for the stairs and –'

'Oh _don't_ ,' said Persis, who would not have trusted even a fully-sighted person on their stairs in the dark. They were a narrow architectural afterthought to the house, and they were so full of unlooked for corners and angles that she didn't trust them even in daylight. The idea of Carl attempting them in the blackness of pre-dawn was in no way comfortable; the stairs were the one part of the house without electricity.

'It's probably only Mrs. Glover being unreasonable,' she said, recovering. 'She's probably woken up with a headache and convinced herself it's rubella or something.'

That had been Mia's thought too, when she woke at two in the morning to the sound of someone groaning and turning over repeatedly in their sleep. No one but her mother could possibly sleep so badly, or convey this circumstance so well to the world. She had thrown the hunter Stewart shawl around her and gone candle in hand to her mother's door, fully expecting the mere sound of passing footsteps to result in a dramatic summons that would surely wake poor Rev. Cross and throw the house into confusion. It had not. In fact, it was obvious to Mia as she lingered in the draughty hallway outside her mother's doorway that for a wonder that woman was soundly, and peacefully asleep.

Her next thought had been of an intruder, and she had stood frozen both from the cold and nervousness, apparently rooted to the uncarpeted floor of the hall before it dawned on her, as it had on her neighbours, that no one trying to get into the house would be doing so with such clamour as to alert the homeowners.

Cats on the roof then, Mia concluded, her heart beginning to beat normally again. Probably some tom invading Symp's territory, and leading to a quarrel on the rooftop…Only Symp didn't hunt, said a persistant voice in the back of Mia's mind. He was too attached to creature comforts and too willing to be waited on by his humans to exert that kind of effort. Her skin had begun to prickle with unease again until the rational part of her brain, the part that should have been acknowledged with a degree in English and Divinity had conjured sensible solutions to such a noise, not cats perhaps but a pigeon trapped in the eaves, or fallen down the flue.

But by then Mia knew she was too awake to get back to sleep, at least not before she'd walked over the house and checked the windows were locked at the very least. Mrs. Glover's room being immediately at the top of the stairs, the obvious course of action had seemed to Mia to begin on the ground floor and work her way back through it, lighting the rooms as she went, which was why it had taken so long for the revelation to break across her that her first instinct had not been wrong; what she had woken to was indeed the sound of another person in distress. Not her mother, but the new curate.

Victor Cross was in the throes of a terrible dream. In the combined light of the electric and the candle she had left her own room with he had appeared to Mia to be at war with the bedclothes. They were knotted and bunched almost into a rope, a fact his subconscious hadn't fully registered to judge by the way his limbs were flailing. In that first moment of seeing him her mind had latched on uncannily to a nonsensical piece of Gilbert and Sullivan Fr. Cameron had once reeled of as a party-trick that was in no way suitable to the situation.

Unsuitable or not though, Mia was rapidly finding she needed it and the levity it offered to keep her rooted, to stop her becoming unsettled. The scene as it was playing out reminded Mia, hesitating in the doorway and the candlelight of her mother's fever-dreams in those last days of the war. Such strange things her mother had said, Mia remembered as she stood shivering and undecided in the hall, and how easily she had bruised. It was this last, the memory of the papery and milky blue of her mother's skin in the aftermath of those night-terrors that propelled her beyond the impropriety of intervention and also backwards into the role of nurse, a role Fr. Cameron would have said she was well used to, a truth true only in that benevolent clergyman's heart.

With the room cast in weird and shadowy relief by the candle Mia had placed on the night table, all the old awkwardness of her first days at home from St. Hilda's came back with a vengeance.

'Torches,' said the dreaming curate, 'torches,' and then 'save us from bloody men.' Awkwardness and uncertainty had teetered on the edge of real fright and then reason had come rushing in. _Psalms_ , had said the part of Mia's mind that even in high anxiety could not forget she had once read English and Divinity and excelled in them. _Deliver me from the works of iniquity and save me from bloody men. You are a rational creature and that is from Psalms._

She had put a hand lightly on the Rev. Cross's shoulder but he had cast it off in his terror as if scalded.

'The earth is full of anger,' he had sobbed into the pillow.

 _Kipling_ , said reason to Mia before nerves could take hold again, _the sea is dark with wrath, you remember_. It was much worse than anything she had ever seen from her mother, much harder to watch. And yet at the time she hadn't seemed capable of doing anything else. By then he was wailing about horses that were very decidedly not there and lashing out against the bunched cord that had become the blankets. The back of the Rev. Cross's hand had struck out against the edge of the bed, his knuckles knocking against the brass of the bars at the headboard, and Mia had retreated in case it should have woken him.

The candle was dying on the night table, its light sloping ever nearer the floor, as wild and erratic as the utterances of the dreamer. It occurred to Mia that she would never be able to do anything once it died and cast the room into darkness, and because all her eyes would let her see in that weird temperamental light was the memory of her mother, blue with bruises and her eyes open in weird imitation of wakefulness and not the reality she was experiencing, she nerved herself to wake him.

'A dream,' said Mia at last, kneeling down in the candlelight and bringing her hand back to his shoulder. He tried to fight her off again but the worst of her nervousness had gone and she had lost the idea that he was breakable. Some sharper, more alert corner of her mind accepted, processed and shelved the idea that there was no more damage that could be wrought.

'Dying,' he murmured and it seemed to come out a question, 'drowning?'

'Dreaming,' said Mia, shaking him gently. 'All a dream, a terrible dream.'

'fool…passed… by…' he mumbled then.

'And that's Kipling again,' said Mia. She had almost recited the rest back at him, to see if it would make any difference, but then line she wanted had come home to her. _Lord grant us strength to die_ , was hardly the sort of sentiment likely to prove useful to an anxious man and the words had stuck in her throat.

'Please,' she had heard herself say instead, 'you must wake up. It's a dream. A terrible dream, but no more than that.'

She was acutely aware, even relaying the story to Persis that she had in fact never believed this last; dreams that vivid were not birthed without ghosts, but Persis's kitchen table in the slanting afternoon sunlight,with the cheerful throbbing and singing of the robins over the eaves hardly seemed the place to unravel that uncomfortable truth.

'It's all right,' Mia had said to him then, 'it's all right now, only a dream,' and all the while she had persisted, her hand on his shoulder shaking him carefully but resolutely back to wakefulness. She thought at first when his eyes came open that he was still asleep, caught in that strange open-eyed dreaming her mother had been given to. Then he had squinted against the light of the candle and pressed fingers clumsily to his eyes as if blotting at them.

Something at her core had turned over, leaving Mia glad she was kneeling then.

'The horses?' he said, the lingering shadow of the dream still discernable in the corner of his eyes. 'The horses. They were…' it struck Mia that the Rev. Cross did not so much lose track of the thought as catch himself.

'What about the horses?' she had prompted. Gingerly, without ever retracting her hand she came and sat down on the extreme edge of the bed.

'It doesn't matter now. It was all a dream.'

'More nearly a nightmare I think.'

'Yes. I'm sorry. I woke you, didn't I? I didn't mean to. Your mother –is she –'

'Sleeping soundly. She always does. I got out of the habit back when she was ill. She really was ill once, you know, after the war. I came out the other side of sitting exams to an exasperated note from a doctor who wanted to know why she wouldn't let him into the house to treat her for that 'flu that went all around the country. Term wasn't quite over…I could have staid in college…but how could I after that? Of course I came home and brought her through it as best I could, and learned to sleep with half an eye open and my ears alert in case she needed anything. I'm afraid it's stuck. You must think I'm interfering terribly.'

'No,' had said the Rev. Cross. He reached spasmodically for her hand and clutched at it. 'Not at all. I'm –glad. It was a pretty grim sort of dream.'

'It wouldn't help to tell me, I suppose?'

'No. It's not –it's not –a –pleasant –story.' The words had come out in snatches as though manoeuvred from him by some unseen puppeteer. Mia had debated pressing the point, but he had looked so afraid in the last of the candlelight that it would have seemed a cruelty to make him relive whatever ordeal it had been.

'I was going to make a mug of hot milk,' she had said, 'shall I bring up some for you?'

'Yes. Yes that's a good thought. Thank you. I really am sorry Miss Glover. I never meant…'

'I know,' Mia had said, 'it's all right,' and leaving the candle with him she had traced her way back through the house, still with its lights on from her earlier excursion, down to the kitchen. There, in what had become for her the beating heart of the house she had allowed herself time to reorder her world, feel her way back to normalcy and paper over the worst of the residual unease she had not been aware she had been warring with while the severest part of Rev. Cross's nightmare had played out. She was cold all over, the wool of the hunter Stewart shawl notwithstanding, and she had stood with her hands on the kitchen counter to anchor her because her nerves were jarred and the rest of her shaking unstoppably. When the worst of it had passed she had made the milk, brought it back to him, and washed up the crockery before trying to reclaim sleep.

At the dining table at Silver Moon, Mia finishes recounting what she can of that evening when she woke to what failed to be intruders and says, 'I don't know what to do.' She twists her hands together, fingers interlaced, seemingly in an effort to stem the worst of the anxiety that has come back to her in the recapitulation of the story.

'You coped better than I would have,' says Persis sincerely.

'I don't feel I did. I felt like one of those butterflies you see in the Natural History Museum, pinned to a board. I didn't know how to be helpful. I don't think I can be, which is worse. I can't ask at any rate.'

'Can't you?'

'No –I'd be pressing or intruding or something... It's not really any of my business. I should never have intruded in the first place.'

Persis, pouring out more tea, is privately of the opinion that whatever the trouble is has very much become Mia's business, that she has become inextricably tied up in the affair of the nightmares whether she likes it or not. There is no way of saying this, however, that presents itself to Persis as both suitable and unlikely to startle Mia with her private terror of meddling in other people's lives.

'It was a good thing you did,' says Persis at length, 'I expect he meant it when he said he was glad you'd woken him up.'

'You can't know that.'

'I can though,' says Persis, who has had her share of ministering to other people's ghosts and nightmares. Some of this surfaces in her eyes and the cast of her mouth because impulsively Mia reaches across the table to squeeze Persis's free hand, the one not presently occupied in the pouring out of fresh tea.

'It was so much simpler before the war,' says Mia, accepting the teacup Persis returns to her and wrapping her hands around it. 'I knew what and how to be then.'

'Yes,' says Persis, 'I know what you mean. Thank goodness we can still be women.'


	13. Chapter 13

_With thanks as ever to those of you reading and reviewing. I hope the burst of good weather we've had up here by the North Sea has found all of you out to. It's about time we were due spring!_

* * *

'What do they call today, then?' Persis wants to know. She and Mia are sitting in the sitting room, such as it is, putting the finishing touches on a crib quilt worked predominantly in woodland greens.

'There should be white for Eastertide,' Mia had said when they began piecing it. This had earned her a raised eyebrow from Persis and the playfully incredulous observation, 'only if you can tell me how to keep it clean when Symp will almost certainly try and appropriate it for something to sleep on even before it's completion.'

Mia could not; her eyes had flashed with quiet humour and she had said, 'I was thinking of Houseman and his cherry trees, not of Symp.'

'Only you,' Persis had said, 'could so effortlessly weave poetry and practicality together. That's not one I know, enlighten me?'

That had been invitation enough and the poem had welled up, effortlessly and unselfconsciously rendered by Mia with intermingled aching of sweetness and poignancy as they had sifted through fabrics. In the end they had settled on shadow blocks in Oxford blue.

Now Mia ties off her stitches and says without having to pause and think in answer to Persis's question, 'it's only an ember day to us. Though I think it's Clean Monday elsewhere'

'And what happens then,' asks Persis as she hands a spool of thread over to Mia.

'I don't know, it's not one of our days, I've told you. I think,' said as Mia breaks of a strand of counted cotton to carry on her sewing, 'the idea is that you give the house an airing. Fr. Cameron would be able to tell you properly. He knows more about Orthodox practice than I do.'

'I see. Is that what I'm keeping you from?'

Mia laughs, shakes her head, jealously guards whatever rituals have attached themselves for her to the Monday in Holy Week and says she would far rather be in the sitting room of Silver Moon quilting the remaining blocks of the crib quilt for the coming baby.

'I'm enjoying this,' Mia says, and smiles. As if proof of this were wanting, she begins to pester Persis as only she can, half-apologetic and cautious, but also with that residual alertness and quickness that shows in her eyes and betrays something of the young woman Fr. Cameron got to know before the war.

'Do you have any inkling what to expect?'

'I'm wary of guessing,' says Persis, laughter in her voice, 'it so rarely seems to come to anything. Certainly Rilla and Faith never have any luck at guessing.'

They had in fact, Persis remembers, developed a knack for expecting the opposite of the child they ended up with, so that by the time little Nora was born, Rilla had quite given up on the idea of a daughter. She tells some of this to Mia, sketching the Glen people and their connections as well as she can, and they laugh.

'I'll guess for you then, shall I?' says Mia with a playfulness Persis has rarely seen in her. Unquestionably though, happiness suits Mia; her eyes rich and coppery like sap fresh for the tapping and shot through with silvers of balsam green, are refulgent with the sunlight seeping through the windows and drenching the room. As she kneels on the floor with marked unconcern for her knees every part of her seems to radiate contentment.

'I think,' she says to Persis as she pauses to rethread her needle, 'it will be a little girl. Carl will make no end of fuss over her of course, and Fr. Cameron too. You and I shall have to compete for any time with her at all. You will let me help a little, won't you?'

She shifts position slightly for comfort's sake, leaning back against the base of the sofa, her face almost childishly open.

It is, Persis has to concede, an idyllic scene and one it is only now possible to imagine. Not long ago it was enough to survive until the arrival of the post, the reading of the newspaper and more recently still it had been sufficient simply to persevere, to reshape the world by continuing to be in it, to revel in all those hallmarks of peace; gardens that sported flowers rather than vegetables, verdant lawns and the luxury of being comfortable, settled, of not fearing for your family and neighbours. Now suddenly it is possible to conceive of a future, to look ahead to it and even anticipate it gladly. It is an unlooked for gift, and it is why Persis cannot help laughing over this last unexpected petition of Mia's.

'Mia, I have a strong suspicion I won't be able to stop you. Of course you'll help. Whatever the rest of the world thinks, I have it on good authority you are capable in excess of the china shepherdess you get mistaken for.'

'Whatever gives you that idea?' Mia warmly asks, laughing herself and scrubbing at her eyes with her fingers as she says it.

'Oh I don't know,' says Persis lightly as she ties off a length of thread, 'it might have its roots in your willingness to sit here stitching with an evenness my mother's hard-working fisher-folk ancestors would envy every bit as much as they'd laud it in spite of being tired, and if I'm right, not having slept properly.'

'I wouldn't have said that exactly,' says Mia warily, addressing her words to the pattern of baby's blocks on the quilt top whose seams she is helping to finish.

'Perhaps not. It comes to the same thing though doesn't it, I mean if you're up in the middle of the night.'

'I've done it before, you know,' says Mia. 'For Midnight Masses and things –and of course when mother was ill.'

'Yes of course,' says Persis. Mentally she kicks herself for forgetting this vital detail; it is all too easy to forget that once, just the once, Mrs. Glover really was seriously ill and not in a way that reminded anyone of Signora Neroni reclining on her sofa.

'But,' Persis cautiously says, 'even that wasn't quite the same, was it? The way you tell it, even your mother's illness never seemed…'she fails to finish the thought, unable to find a way of conveying her increasing sense that these recurrent nightmares carry more weight with them and take more from her than Mia will directly acknowledge.

'Mother never seemed to dream much or so terribly, no,' says Mia, helpfully weaving her own interpretation of this conversational lacuna. There is no doubt now about the extent of this unacknowledged tiredness; it has found it's way into Mia's voice, a wavery raggedness that both women choose not to notice.

Instead Persis says, 'It does seem to happen rather often. How many broken evenings does this make now?'

'Oh I don't know,' says Mia, stopping again and pressing her fingers to her eyes. She doesn't seem to be rubbing sleep from them so much as struggling to actualise an idea.

'I've lost count. I can't remember a night that didn't end with me heating milk in the kitchen in an ineffective attempt at staving off some unmentionable horror.' She removes her hands, swipes loose strands of hair behind her ears and hastens to add, 'I don't mind, you know.'

'I never suggested you did,' Persis mildly says. ' It isn't only you who worries, Mia.'

Mia, deftly running stitches onto her needle, unbends enough from her work to give Persis a look she can only interpret as gratitude.

'I used to forget,' says Mia as the seams of the quilt fill in. ' I used to wake up the second time, with the sun, still tired and write it all off as an insufficiency of sleep or an especially disconcerting dream. And you know, he's always so cheerful, light even, in the daytime. You'd never guess…It feels such a long time ago now, Rev. Cross's arrival, and Christmas and the evenings when those nightmares were more intrusion than routine.'

Neither of them dares stop what they are doing. Persis feels sure the minute either of them stops quilting that Mia will stop talking altogether. They have talked frequently in the year that has passed, and not once can Persis remember talking to Mia –talking meaningfully –when her friend's hands were unoccupied. If it weren't the crib quilt and its seams this afternoon it would be some other chore, Persis is sure. At the very least Mia would be taking the tassels of a cushion in hand and fussing with them, or smoothing away creases from her skirt that aren't there because she is too careful about the ironing.

'It would be easy to forget, I imagine,' says Persis. 'Whenever we've seen him he's seemed so uncomplicated, open even.'

Mia makes a noise that might be agreement or indecision. Her needle flashes into view, glinting silver and sharp in the sunlight.

'He's good at listening,' she says as the needle re-emerges and she finishes with a block of the quilt, 'I think it must be a habit they're taught to cultivate. I'm glad of it by daylight –I except lots of people are –but it's another thing entirely when there's an hour before sunrise and I'm trying to be reassuring. Then it can be like talking to granite, and I haven't got an instinct for knowing what to say, whatever anyone tells you.'

'It wouldn't matter,' says Persis with decision. 'I know you. You're sweetness and light personified when the world isn't seeing fit to put you through refiner's fire.' Then impulsively, teasingly, Persis says, 'since when do you know so much about him? I thought you weren't often together.'

'Not often, no,' says Mia. She has bent over the quilt again, pulling a half-buried needle from an overlooked seam and starting to fill it. Her fingers appear to fly, sharp and quick, putting Persis in mind of the sparrows of Sussex Ave that annually nettle her mother by nibbling at the lawn. Finding Mia's answer to have stalled, Persis nudges her elbow affectionately.

'Not often?' she says.

Usually in the evening,' says Mia, never pausing in her quilting 'when mother's gone up for the night.' She is quilting four-stitches-and-pull, all of them small and even, and allowing of that golden ideal, 12 stitches to an inch. 'We've talked, had tea on occasion.' It comes home to her belatedly what she has said, and she tucks the needle into a seam and crosses her arms, tucking her hands into the crooks of her elbows. 'Persis,' she says, 'you're finding things that aren't there. You mustn't.' Then smiling, 'even you can't possibly conjure things from talk of sermon ideas and their ilk.'

'I'm sure castles have been founded on less.' Tea in cast-iron tea bowls and talk of candles, for instance. Persis almost says as much, then catches Mia's eye and resists.

'Persis, please.'

'All right,' says Persis, 'I won't tease. I meant what I said before though, I expect you do an admirable job of saying the right thing.'

'I never feel it,' says Mia, with another swipe at her eyes and the escaped strands of hair.

'No, we never do. I wish there was a way we could help. I don't like seeing all of this fall on you.'

'You do help,' says Mia. 'You're my soft place to run to ground when I can't manage to forget, or at the very least push away the memory of whatever terror it is I've been pulled into wakefulness to assuage. Besides, it's not me I mind about. I'm not much in the habit of dreaming.'

She begins to rethread her needle and her fingers betray her, wavering and eluding the needle's eye not only on her first effort but several consecutive attempts. Mia closes her eyes, seemingly trusting to instinct, worries her lip and then asks with as much unconcern as she can reasonably manage, 'why do you suppose it's always the best of people that come away from an encounter with sheer horror the worse for it?'

'They haven't the taste for it,' says Persis. The thread in Mia's fingers swerves wide of the needle again, her fingers too unsteady to cooperate. Persis neatly extracts thread and needle from her and says as she begins to minister to them, 'Ken said once that the men in his company that he worried about most were the ones who took to guns and killing apparently naturally. They were the ones he agonised over when he got home, worried about how they were adapting to life in peace. Among other things.'

She hands the threaded needle to Mia who smiles her thanks. 'I don't know what's wrong with me,' she says as he goes back to the quilt.

'You're tired,' Persis offers, 'and more than a little worried, I think.' And just possibly dreaming a little, Persis thinks. She wouldn't like to say though.

'I'm all right,' says Mia, cupping her eyes in her hands again. 'Really I am.'

'Are you though?'

'Only tired,' says Mia to the inside of her hands, 'you said so yourself.' It is wholly possible she is smiling slightly as she makes this observation but her hands make it hard to judge. They are pressed against her face in such a way as to obscure her words and it is only because the house is quiet that Persis has no trouble deciphering them.

'If that were all, you'd have redirected my attention ages ago. You haven't.'

'No,' concedes Mia, 'I suppose not.' Cautiously Mia brings her hands away from her face and feels her way along the seam of the quilt until she finds her needle, upright and with four even stitches ensnared on it, like some captive and pinned butterfly. She uproots it and pulls the stitches through. The seams slowly fill with stitches, little rows that uncurl like so many delicate vines.

'Mia,' Persis gingerly says, 'are you in love with Victor Cross?'

The question makes Mia start, and she looks up sharply.

'No,' she says as she curtails another row of stitches. More unfurling vines. 'No, not that. Only in danger of falling in love with him, I think.'

'Would it be so awful?'

The stitches in the seams appear to overwhelm Mia's attention, tendrils and vines uncurling at an enviable rate, and always even and smooth. The sun shifts, and a silence, taut and guarded begins to weave an existence for itself, palpable to Persis in the way it occupies the surface of the crib quilt between them. Persis is halfway to giving her a reprieve and asking who taught Mia stitches like this when Mia answers.

'It isn't that exactly. It would cause ever so much talk –always supposing it came to anything –but even that's only part of it. It wouldn't be more or worse than anything mother would say. It's more that the timing is wrong, and even if it weren't…'she stops short out of necessity, surprised at the revelation she has run out of breath. She inhales uncertainly, stumbles fractionally in her sewing and catches her finger with the needle.

'Even if it weren't,' says Persis for her, 'you still don't know about those horses.'

'Yes,' says Mia, pressing the injured digit against her thumb, 'yes. And it might be it doesn't matter, but as long as they're haunting him like that, as long as I'm chasing away a memory I can't parse, it does.' Drops of blood spring like roses into blossom on Mia's fingertip, even as she ministers to it.

'But you aren't in love with him.'

'No. Please Persis.'

Then tell me why it matters so much, the nightmares and the horses and all the rest?' She hands Mia a handkerchief and Mia wraps it around her finger to staunch the bleeding, keeping her hands carefully away from the quilt.

'I'm in over my head,' she says softly, 'and I don't understand –however much I want to –what's at stake. I can't, when I don't even know what they're about, those dreams, and I mustn't press, mustn't ask because it's vitally important it be his decision. He must _want_ to tell me, do you see? If I can't help him, if I can't even be told what the trouble is, really is I mean, then I've failed him completely. '

'If it helps at all,' says Persis cautiously, 'it can be enough sometimes to be that still centre, to be an anchor even without understanding. Sometimes that's all that's wanted.'

'Do you think so?'

'Yes,' says Persis with such quiet conviction that Mia's instinctive cleverness ignites.

'Tell me?'

The transitory afternoon light shifts again and splashes light and warmth across the tableau they make, Mia with her hands cupped and outstretched, the handkerchief dappled red where it lies like a bandage around Mia's lancinated finger, Persis wound like a spring, unmoving, and thoughtful. She tries as she takes in the hopeful chatter of the young thrushes in the yews outside the window to find words that convey the complexity of the thing she has described.

'It's a mixed thing,' says Persis carefully, over the rippling sound of the thrushes, 'to know that someone will brave hell and destruction to save you from ever knowing either. Harder than that, I think, is the realisation that to do that they've found in you a goodness that exceeds whatever measure you'd have credited yourself with, and exceeds it inestimably. That can be terrifying.'

' _She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life_ –yes, I suppose it would be, trying to match an ideal like that.'

'Trust you to have the relevant scripture at your fingertips,' says Persis with a smile. 'Hardest of all though is learning how to receive. Giving, especially to someone you love, that costs nothing. To receive in return, and do it graciously…it's not an easy thing to do. To be loved like that though, as if it were a privilege, a safeguard against anything that might or has or could go wrong…do you know, I don't think I'd trade it for anything simpler, or more effortless or less complicated.'

'No,' says Mia softly, 'I can believe that.'


	14. Chapter 14

_With thanks due as always to readers and reviewers both. The things you say and the time you take out of your day is always appreciated. This next chapter owes an enormous debt to Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man; a Mass for Peace. If you've never heard it, it is well worth a listen._

* * *

Victor Cross is deep in the midst of a dream. In it the animals scatter in all directions, and over it _the double, double beat of the thundering drums_ , _the thundering drums_ , _the thundering, thundering drums,_ and competing with them the loud and excitable clamour of the trumpet. Above these, worse than the drums and the trumpets is the sound of the horses screaming. Their bodies light up like living, breathing torches, lending a glow to the disfigured faces of the men who went in to save them against government orders and the smell of _their_ flesh burning too…And always the mud, and the _double, double beat of the thundering drum, the thundering drum, the thundering, thundering drum…_ louder than ever, steady as a heartbeat, brutal as a battering-ram and sounding like an anvil against the hot iron of his psyche. Then there comes _the trumpet's loud clamour_ , egging the fevered drums on, the noise of it driving them to arms, himself, his men at arms, the men who had died for the horses…not forgetting the horses screaming, of course. Never forgetting the horses screaming as the animals scatter…shatter…drown in the mud…

To Victor Cross the sensation is of falling backwards in time. He is in fact in France again, a shell throwing him backwards and leaving him shaking from the shock of it…or is that one of the men? It is hard to tell over the trumpet's loud clamour and the beat of the traitorous drums, and always, always the horses screaming. Something is holding him fast anyway, and he must throw it off because it means to drown him in the mud. He is sure of this, afraid of it, but he can't dislodge whatever it is. He thrashes about wildly, unable to breathe, and whatever it is keeps shaking him. He supposes in his anguish it must be a person after all. Is he like the horses then, dying so slowly and horribly that some benevolent person has made up their mind to try and put him out of his misery, to drown him in the mud and save him dying by inches? No, because now whatever-it-is is speaking, and even in this nightmare world shells can't speak, or if they do he doesn't reckon they sounded like this.

'A dream,' says the voice, 'Victor –all a dream, a terrible dream.'

When still he struggles with the hand –for surely that's what it is –that wrestles with him, the voice says with increasing urgency, 'it's all right, all right, it was only a dream.'

It is trying to drown him or kill him at the very least or…there comes through the haze of the terror, the stench of the mud, the blood and burning flesh, a rush of something incongruously wholesome, a scent like after the rain and gorse, that peculiarly Scottish harbinger of spring. He has never placed it before because of the striking Englishness of the person he associates it with. It was Miss Glover's hand on his shoulder, gentle and steady, and she was saying, 'Rev. Cross –Rev. Cross it's all right. It was a dream, a bad dream.'

He looks up at her wide-eyed, and then shuts his eyes against the light of the candle in her hand, the beat of the drums and the sound of the trumpets still filling his head.

'The horses,' he says with difficulty. He has been holding his breath and now he is left gasping for air; no wonder he dreamed of drowning in the mud, of the shells and the horses screaming as they caught fire…

'The horses were –' but he catches himself in time. He cannot possibly tell Miss. Glover about the horses, the smell of their burning flesh and the orders he and his men had been given to leave them to die.

'The horses?' Of all things she sounds relieved that at gone half two in the morning he is crying out incoherently about horses. She looks at him with not a little anxiety and for the first time in the course of knowing her, Victor Cross feels the full force of Amelia Glover's acuity aimed his way; he cannot very well lie to her, she'd catch him out at once, he realises that, and he equally cannot tell her about the horrors of the war. He has to say something though because her eyes – not hazel but almost gold in the candlelight –are looking at him and pressing for an answer. Not gold, he thinks, as he scrabbles for an answer to offer her. Fine sherry, and he ought to know; God knows it seems to feature at enough church functions; it is not after all only horrors that he is familiar with. This is a gratifying revelation but does nothing to curb the look in Miss. Glover's eye, patient and intractable. She would have made a formidable lecturer to some undeserving and incurious Oxford first-years, he thinks.

'I can't make them stop,' says Victor Cross at last. 'The horses, this is.'

'I know,' Mia says gently, softly, 'I wish you would tell me about it.'

Sometime between dreaming and waking he has begun to cry. He reaches first for the handkerchief he hasn't got because he is in bed and to judge by the hands of the wall clock the time is unholy, and then for the corner of the sheet he can't find because the blankets are too tumbled and twisted.

'Here,' says Mia, 'come here, it's all right.'

He doesn't argue for several reasons, the chiefest of these being that he doesn't expect to be held. The sensation of it is not as he has imagined it. Her arms are much stronger than he has credited them with, but with the same gentleness he has come to associate with her hands at the height of these night terrors. Also it is like coming home, and for a moment it seems possible to fall asleep like this and –oh happy thought –not be overwhelmed with dreaming. Drowsily he inhales the cleanness of after the rain and gorse where it lingers in her hair, speaking to some earlier evening ritual to untangle and plait it ready for sleep. Then manners intervene and Victor Cross spares a thought for how instinctively these tonics and ministrations come to Mia, almost as if this were a lesson she had learned by rote, mooring disconsolate dreamers.

'Your mother,' he says, 'when she was ill, I suppose she dreamed?' He should perhaps sit up, disengage, give her back some sense of space but he is certain if he does he will fall to trembling and sobbing, and he is so very tired. Much better to stay with his head on her shoulder, one of her hands smoothing his forehead and anchoring the world for him while he breaths in the smell of after-the rain and gorse and reorders it.

'Yes, vividly. Not so…' she hesitates and Victor reaches to fill the gap.

'Often?'

'Badly, I was going to say,' says Mia mildly. Her hand against his forehead has all the silkiness and smoothness of down. 'Not so badly as you.'

'And when she was ill,' says Victor, who has fastened onto this topic partly out of curiosity, partly to keep Mia away from the substance of the nightmare she has averted, from the horses he cannot bear to think about, 'there were other people here? Nurses and things?'

'There's a thought,' says Mia halfway to laughing. 'There should have been. There was an impatient doctor who I shouldn't be hard on because he was overworked and hadn't been allowed to sleep for months, and there was me. I wasn't a nurse and I didn't know how to be. The wonder would be if he _hadn't_ been impatient.'

'I expect you made a bloody good nurse.' Belatedly he realises what he has said and tries to shape an apology, but if Mia hears it she never says. By then she is laughing, he can feel the sound of it rise up, emanating from below her sternum even before it has left her lips.

'You and Fr. Cameron,' she says. 'Mother will vouch for the inaccuracy of that idea. I wasn't fishing.'

In the bleary aftermath of a nightmare there is no polite way Victor can conjure that conveys adequately his trust in Mrs. Glover's mangled opinions about her daughter. Not at this stage that it seems likely to matter, he has already more than proved his human frailty.

'I shouldn't think she remembers much of it,' he says sleepily.

'No,' says Mia, 'perhaps not. I do though, and she's right.'

He is on the verge of overwhelming manners finally and completely and contradicting her, but she says, 'you're tired. I'll let you sleep. Would hot milk help? I could leave the candle if you like.'

'It would only waste a candle,' he says as she rises from the edge of the bed and begins to go. He catches at her sleeve, child-like he thinks, and stays her.

'Please,' he says, 'will you stay?'

'If you like.' Cautiously, as though handling something breakable, she disentangles his hand from the sleeve of her nightgown and retreats to the eastward-facing window. There can't be anything to see there, the night is cloudy, there has been no moon, and the candlelight shows just enough of the wall clock to assure Victor that the time is still some hour not meant to be witnessed by mortals. All this notwithstanding Mia Glover curls up on the window seat and rests her head against the glass, her shape just discernable in the candlelight if he makes the effort to look. She wraps the thick blue-and-yellow embroidered curtains around her against the unseasonable cold, almost disappearing into their silk brocaded depths. She looks so incredibly young like that that Victor is struck by a sudden and sharp impression of her as a child, home for the holidays and tucked away in some silk-papered room and half-hidden in the folds of the matching drapery, seeking escape from some overwrought holiday function, or possibly only from Mrs. Glover.

'You won't tell me about the horses then,' he hears her ask of the room at large after the elision of several minutes. The shock not of the question but of her voice, which is not at all a child's, so jars the picture he has constructed that he nearly stumbles into confessing to her. He is saved by his frayed nerves, and his imperfect lungs, which are still not working as they should, the words sticking hard in a constricted throat.

'It's an ugly story, Mia,' he says, turning to look at her. Then, 'I'm sorry. I never meant…'

'You didn't wake me,' she says, and this is so far from the offense he is apologising for that he is uncertain what answer to give her. She doesn't give him time to work one out. She extracts one arm from the heavy brocade of the curtains and begins to trace the skeletal shape of the frame with its long narrow ridges like plough furrows as she says 'if you think I haven't my share of ghosts and gremlins to contend with in the small hours of the morning, you're very much mistaken.'

She has turned so that he cannot see her face, but it doesn't matter, her voice has left him no room to doubt her. He turns away himself, meaning to fall asleep, but then the vividness of his dream comes back to him, the images dance before his eyes, murky and ill-defined and waiting for that moment when his eyes betray him by closing.

He is suddenly certain that if Mia –Miss Glover –stays any longer in the room he will do something absurd like begin to confide the contents of that hellish dream to her, and he mustn't do that. The massy curtains have all the trimmings of a confessional, and it is a brutal story, the story of the screaming, shattering horses. It would hurt her, he is sure of it, ghosts and gremlins aside. Though even as he thinks of it his mind unwittingly summons the memory of her gentle practicality in the face of the nightmare and suggests uncomfortably that she would cope after all. It is not a risk he wants to take. Anyway, the telling of it would undoubtedly hurt _him_.

'Miss Glover,' he asks, never turning to look at her, 'do you think –would you mind very much –could I have that milk after all?'

'Of course,' and with a lightness worthy of Symp she alights from the window seat and picks her way across the room. In another moment she is gone, taking the candle with her, leaving only the indistinct memory of a vision of golds and greens, steady as a rock and gentle and calm as the Isis in a placid mood.

That had been the second time it happened and at least the second time, says Victor to Persis in the aftermath of the nightmare, they are prepared. Or if not prepared, then each has a better idea of what to expect of the other. By the time he has called into Silver Moon in the middle of Holy Week he has lost count of the number of times this has happened and it has all the trappings of ritual.

There is nothing that will induce Persis to acknowledge on this occasion that she has the least idea what the nervous curate is talking about. Had Mia been less anxious, less raw and weeping in her vulnerability it would perhaps be different. As it is the confession has all the weight of something unintentionally but necessarily parted with. She pours rich, dark black tea into the tea bowls like thimbles, and guards that trust, thinking all the while of Ken when he visited almost a year ago. He and Victor share, Persis realises as she watches Victor Cross not looking at her, tracing shapes on the maple wood of the table, many of the same hallmarks of nervousness. Not just the averted eyes, which might be symptomatic of anyone –Mia at her most reluctant has before now held whole conversations with the kitchen counter, the hearth, the contents of her tea –but the same tilt of the head, stiffening of the shoulders, a not dissimilar way of fidgeting with their collars, the same tendency to rub the back of the neck against discomfort. All things, she supposes, one might contrive to do unnoticed while standing at attention and taking orders. The way Victor turns the tea bowl between his fingers though, Persis notes as she swallows her smile, is wholly Mia.

'Victor,' says Persis mildly, and apparently to the window behind his left shoulder, 'what is it that has happened? Begin at the beginning, can't you, and humour me?'

She knows better than to look at him. Nina had once said nothing disconcerted a singer so much as the sensation of being watched, and while no doubt this is true, it seems unlikely to be true only of singers. Ken at any rate has gone the whole step further into fumbling questions he doesn't want to answer if they are aimed at him complete with eye contact. Even so there is a protracted silence in which stillness spins out between them pulled by the draft of some unseen spindle. If it were Carl sitting in her place, Persis thinks, this would be a moot point, whatever the problem it would, albeit with difficulty, be given up on the assumption that he knew about the war and what it had been like to survive it. It never occurs to Persis that this is to do with anything less; otherwise it would all have been poured out unconcernedly to Mia Glover at some ungodly hour of the morning, and it would be Mia here now, trying not to look anxious or wring her hands or give in to those visible hallmarks of heroism. As it is very much Victor Cross applying to her with cryptic hints and ciphers, Persis nurses her tea, thinks of Ken and does not press.

Eventually, after what feels easily hours but only registers as minutes on the kitchen clock, he offers Persis what she can only suppose is a sanitised account of the whole.

'And what of the horses?' asks Persis gently. Opposite her, olive-green eyes fixedly on the tabletop, Victor turns white.

I've frightened her, haven't I?' he says to the Maplewood of the table.

'Not frightened,' says Persis, reaching for his hand and patting it reassuringly, 'worried. It's not the same thing. She's not like one of your horses, Victor, she won't spook. Amelia Glover isn't half so breakable as the world imagines.'

Victor is appreciably silent another ten seconds, his face a mirror of his momentary confusion. Then it clears and he says more to himself than to her, 'Mia –Miss Glover –of course. I never meant, would never have wanted –'

'You haven't,' says Persis.

It is then, as she offers him a second cup of tea that she comes to appreciate fully the curious and stilted circumstances under which these two people have come to know one another. Between the easy familiarity of Fr. Cameron, Carl and herself, and Victor's own misplaced formality, he has never learned Mia's Christian name in its entirety. There has been no occasion to warrant it with Mrs. Glover –the only person who uses it – holed up in her bedroom, declining his company and conjuring illnesses for herself.

'You're not going to tell me about the horses either,' Persis says and there is no room at all for him to misconstrue this as a question. Victor offers her a small, apologetic smile that stretches tight at the corners.

'It isn't a nice story.'

'Are any of our stories about the war?'

'No, but I mean –it's worse than most.'

Persis makes no effort to contradict this. They all have, no doubt, their own private worsts, things that exist in their understanding outwith the limits of what humanity should be reasonably expected to process. For Ken it was those men he sent over the top, she thinks, the way they all took on Walter's face or at least Walter's import for him. Only, Ken had been able to tell her about that because at the end of the day they had blood in common and a decided lack of secrets.

'I'd rather Mia, that is Miss Glover, not learn it,' he says to distil the rapidly expanding silence.

'All right,' says Persis. 'You might tell Mia something though. She's in this now whether you like it or not.'

'I never meant –that is if I could have thought –I'd have left Mia –Miss Glover –out of it if it had been possible.'

'I know,' says Persis, 'but it hasn't happened that way. And Mia's not –she has no pretensions to being a heroine, I think that's what I mean. That doesn't mean she isn't capable of acting the part.'

Victor shakes his head, studies his hands and then the tabletop and tacitly offers his agreement.

'You'll tell Carl anyway,' says Persis, changing tack.

'Sorry?'

'About the horses. If you won't tell Mia or me, you will tell Carl?'

Victor considers, spares another look at the sheen of the table, at his hands, where the fine hairs on their backs stand out against the sunlight, and concedes that he could perhaps do this at least. He nods acquiescence.

'All right. I'll even grant you the unpleasantness of the horses and their story for that,' Persis says. 'But you must understand this, because it's important and it's why you must tell Mia something at the very least. Not the whole story,' she says seeing him about to protest, 'but something. Not knowing,' says Persis patiently, 'is without exception harder than any truth a person might be asked to bear. When we don't know the worst, when we aren't sure what to expect, we conjure endless possibilities to fill in the blanks, and that is worst of all, because there is nothing to rival the horrors of our own construction.'

They fall silent as the veracity of this comes home to Victor.

'You know this,' says Victor finally, in what Persis has come to think of as his curate's manner, genial, unassuming, apparently certain of his world.

'There weren't any horses,' says Persis, 'but I've done my bit of imagining, if that's what you mean.'

'Mia –Miss Glover –said much the same the other evening.'

'Then I expect she meant it. You might be so good as to believe her.'

'I do,' he says earnestly, 'it isn't that at all. But I can't –I'd hate to hurt her. The world seems to have made such a habit of it, you know.'

'You've noticed too?' Then, before he can answer, Persis is smiling at him with real warmth an saying, 'and for goodness sake, Victor, use her Christian name if you like – _I_ won't say.'

He colours to the root of his hair and begins to revolve an empty tea bowl between his fingers. Deftly Persis takes it from him and replenishes it.

'She would forgive you the liberty, you know,' she says as she sets the tea bowl in his hands. 'It's not as if it's a formality you've observed with other parishioners. All the rest of us have names and you use those.'

'That's not the same thing.'

Victor picks up the milk and scrutinizes it, considers and cautiously measures a portion into his tea.

'Why not?'

The question startles him and he sets the milk jug down with a jarring. 'I'm not –' He stops, apparently sorting through and rejecting answers. In the end Persis comes to his rescue.

'You're not afraid of falling in love with the others, are you?'

Victor does not answer. For the first time since they have sat down to tea he looks up at Persis, wide-eyed and surprised as some tame, startled gazelle, or perhaps a gently disconcerted dove. It is vastly apparent to Persis that that particular Rubicon was crossed some time ago, no doubt by candlelight at some improbable hour of the morning. The watercolour light of early morning, would after all, Persis finds herself thinking, no doubt suit Mia as the flatter light of the latter part of the day does not. He is so visibly uneasy at this revelation that Persis can't help smiling. 'It's all right,' she says, 'I won't let on.'


	15. Chapter 15

_With thanks always for reading and/or reviewing. It's always good to hear what you think._

* * *

Carl is squinting when he finds his way into St. Mary Magdalene. He has forgotten though lack of attendance how dim it can be inside of a church, even on sunny April days as this one, when the light is being filtered through high windows with stained glass. He stands blinking confusedly in the doorway, taking in the pews and the refreshment table converted to hold postcards of Oxford and a handful of relevant brochures, until he is startled back into the errand he is running by Mia's inquiry from somewhere on his right, 'you've come looking for Persis?'

He turns to talk to her and finds she has vanished, only to reappear on his left, slipping her arm apologetically through his. 'I ought to know by now,' she says.

'Never mind. Are you all right, you don't look as if you've slept.' More nearly she looks as if she has been in tears, and sounds it too, her voice still possessed of the watery edge that she has not quite suppressed, but to say these things seems impolitic.

'It's Holy Week,' says Mia, surfacing a smile for him, 'it isn't the season for sleeping. You can ask anyone you like –provided they're one of ours.'

Carl raises his eyebrows doubtfully. 'One of ours?' he repeats, 'is there anyone besides your lot in England?'

'Oh yes,' says Mia, 'just not in our circle.'

'Mm. Holy week –that's really all it is?'

Mia tucks her hands into the creases of her elbows, her fingers playing some soundless pattern against her arms. 'I suddenly feel forgiven for forgetting about your eyes. You've a knack for noticing things. Details.'

'Part of my discipline, isn't it?'

'What, and people are so like insects as all that?'

'At the moment you've much more in common with a moth, I must say. One I've trapped in a jar at that. What I meant,' he says, rushing on before she can decry the veracity of this, 'is that the college seems to expect us to make sense of a lot of uncertain undergraduates.'

'I see. I was one once. I expect that helps.'

'I wouldn't have said that exactly. Aren't we allowed to know each other after a year? I have a sort of idea that in the ordinary way of things you don't come in here to hover in the side chapel in anticipation of the late night vigil or the veneration of the cross or what have you.' For a moment Mia wavers and Carl smiles.

'The Stripping of the Altar,' supplies Mia for him. She has retreated to the safety of one of the back pews and has now curled up in it backwards, so as to still be facing him. Her feet are crushed under her knees and her hands hug the back of the pew while pillowing her chin; from this vantage point she looks up at Carl with almost childlike trust, at once confident of her place in this well-ordered liturgical world and wary of the conversation he has begun.

'Of course,' Carl says, 'for Maundy Thursday. You see; I'm learning to make sense of your church. I didn't grow up a minister's son for nothing.' This elicits a smile that almost reaches Mia's eyes and puts Carl in mind of Una as a young girl.

'Do you know, I'd forgotten that too?'

'People here seem to. It's a novelty. I don't suppose it would do any good, you telling me about whatever it is that's not Holy Week and keeping you awake? I've had my share of white nights.'

'Persis is through in the vestry making sense of the cassock-albs,' says Mia, suddenly straightening to perch on the edge of the pew with precision. 'The choir wanted them laundered and aired before the Tridium. We've done that, only now they want rehanging and no one's quite sure which ones belong in which cupboards. Shall I show you?'

'I didn't think you would. You'll tell her, will you, if not me, seeing as whatever it is evidently has nothing to do with cassock-albs and their correct allocation.'

It strikes Carl as he extends a hand to help her to her feet that Mia is not naturally so nervous as this, not around people she knows in a place she's at home in. For a start, she can usually be relied upon to answer the questions put to her. She had been less skittish than this that afternoon of their first meeting. Even nervous though, she is almost preternaturally sharp.

'You'll feel better about going if I agree, won't you,' says Mia, and it is more observation than inquiry.

'Only if you promise,' says Carl with equal candour.

'Yes, all right, I'll promise.' Mia begins purposefully to lead him through the church towards the choir vestry, her movements sharp and precise.

'It isn't my worry,' says Mia when she can no longer see him.

'You've evidently made it yours,' Carl says with a gentleness hitherto reserved for Lucy, skittish cavalry horses and Persis on those far away and aching evenings in India.

'I haven't,' says Mia, turning unexpectedly round to face him, 'not on purpose.'

Her colour is more heightened than Carl can remember seeing it, and her eyes wider. In the church light, tempered by the stained glass, they are more brown than green and Carl is reminded of Lucy at her most anxious. He would not be at all surprised if like Lucy, she were to duck past him and bolt to safety. For a moment Mia closes her eyes, whether against the light or tears or some other emotion Carl can't say because his good eye is still rebelling against the transition from bright light, to low light to the suddenness of the sunbeam that shoots through a nearby window and sends a splash of refracted colour across Mia's face and the light stone of the building. Again Mia seems to waver, but this time she is not on the edge betraying some relevant piece of conversation but of actually falling.

Carefully Carl takes her elbow in hand and stays her somewhere in the region of the third Station of the Cross. 'Mia,' he says quietly and without a trace of curiosity, 'please.'

In the sun-struck stillness of the church it comes out as a neutralised whisper that is neither command nor inquiry nor even a plea.

'What's the matter? Between friends?'

'I don't know,' says Mia, her eyes wide, as if threatening tears. They are tears; Carl realises this only when Mia tilts her head backwards towards the ceiling to catch them before they can risk falling. They hover for a moment on the edge of her eyelashes, so many little rainbows, and then recede; only then does she look at Carl again, and even then she is more nearly looking over his shoulder. Looking at her Carl is reminded again of Una, and how in the aftermath of their mother's death she had trusted her secrets to him not because he was her especial favourite but because he had been too young to ply her with questions, to foist platitudes on her. Now, in the stillness of the church, at the foot of the third station and dazzled by the wash of colour-stained sunlight, he waits, and his patience is rewarded.

'It's something to do with horses,' says Mia quietly, twisting awkwardly away from him to take in the ironwork of Christ falling the first time.

'And it's not your worry.'

'No.'

It is enough for Carl to reconstruct the story such as she will not tell it; there are only so many people in Mia's world as he is acquainted with it, and even fewer are the people she seems likely to worry so thoroughly about. Quietly, in some shadowed corner of his mind he resolves to have a word with Victor Cross. There is a way of doing this, he is sure, that makes no mention of Mia.

'I really don't know more than that.'

'I know,' says Carl. He is surprised to find he is still speaking in a whisper, though not at all ambushed by the sincerity of the statement. He does know too, because in spite of the hush and the palpable sanctity of the building, he can hear again the frenetic barking of the dogs. In his mind's eye he sees again the fireweed and the mud, and Lucy running towards him like a star brought to earth. He wonders uneasily what it is that is weighing on the curate, and shivers. There were so many kinds of cruelty to learn in the war that to forget them all Carl supposes would be unthinkable, impossible.

'I know,' he says again, not sure which of them he is soothing. Then, to bring her out of herself and the half-communicated worry, he says, 'you said something about Persis being through in the choir vestry?'

It is after all, what he had come for and that is all it takes to break the tenuous thread of connectivity that has sprung up between them in the last few minutes and seemingly stopped the clock. This time Mia does bolt, darting past Christ falling the first time, and Christ carrying the Cross, and whatever that curious first station is. Carl squints at it to make it out, tilts his head sideways, and only just discerns the lettering around the bottom. _Gabbatha_. Of course, Carl thinks, as the memory of so many Easters and Good Fridays in Glen St. Mary's Presbyterian church come back to him, _he brought Jesus forth, and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called the Pavement, but in the Hebrew, Gabbatha_ intoned in his father's mild-mannered voice, not a hint of catholic iconography on display, only warmth and apology for inflicting such gloom on his faithful flock. Of course these strange ironwork depictions of what is surely the emotional nadir of collective consciousness begin with the condemnation. _His blood be on us and on our children_ , that was part of it, he remembers, and shivers suddenly at the aptness. It appeals to what Carl has heard Mother Rosemary describe as the 'Good Friday theology' of his aunt Martha, with its stress on mortification and suffering and private agonies. Mia is still walking at a clip towards the vestry steps. Carl hears her –the sound of her shoes against the stone of the floor, the uncertain sound of her breathing –more than sees her as he hurries to catch her up. She pauses only long enough to reverence the altar, looking back to over her shoulder as she rises to see if he has kept pace with her.

When he rejoins her she stays him long enough to ask uneasily, 'You won't let on I've said? I shouldn't have done –only I can't make it right.'

'You're not expected to,' says Carl simply. 'As for the rest, I know nothing. Not a word.' That earns Carl a smile and emboldened he ventures, 'and you'll honour that promise, will you, and talk properly to Persis?'

'There isn't much left to tell. I've told most of it to her before.'

'Tell her the rest,' says Carl comfortably and without force. 'She's better at this sort of thing than I am, knowing what to say and do.'

'You sell yourself short,' says Mia.

'No,' says Carl, 'but I don't like seeing you harrowed like that. It's a martyrdom too far.'

'Now you sound like Fr. Cameron.' She is almost laughing, a shaky, uneven sound but after the strain of the last quarter-hour it is a relief to both of them.

'He's right though,' says Carl.

'What about?'

'All of it,' says Carl with a casual sweep of his hand, 'about the rarity of really good music, the virtues of Henry James, the communities one finds in churches and colleges, and about saints belonging in stained glass windows and not in everyday life.'

'If it's any consolation, I hardly qualify for that last. I don't belong in a window at all.'

 _No_ , thinks Carl, _but_ _you keep appearing in them at unearthly hours, when normal people would be asleep, and all the lights in that house on to no purpose._ Aloud he says, 'I think I can safely wager there's more than just me that want convincing on that point.'

Mia folds her arms. 'The choir vestry,' she says, nodding in the direction of the passage between the choir stalls and the organ.

Carl begins to disappear into the wings of the vestry, stops and says, 'you will keep that promise?'

'Cross my heart,' says Mia, her fingers moving in practiced and elaborately catholic gesture. 'The Sanctus bells want polishing,' she says. 'It's the one time of the year we don't need them and I get the chance. Will you let me go?'

For an absurd moment he considers actually teasing her, of pointing out that she could have done this earlier, that on a normal day under normal circumstances that is how he would have happened upon her in this place. He rejects the idea though, and anyway, Carl strongly suspects his answer would carry no weight. Mia is already running easily down the steps and behind the pews, a hand skimming over their tops as she goes.

It is late in the evening when Carl looks up from marking his student's essays for the vanished Hillary term and asks of Persis, 'is there any particularly good reason why Mia shouldn't care for that new curate?'

'No. Who have you been talking to?'

'Myself mostly. It was a guess. Certainly she won't tell me anything about it.'

'And you think I will?'

'I don't know, you often do.'

'About church gossip, not friends' hearts.'

'I suppose,' says Carl, with a sigh that speaks as much to his students' indifferent handwriting as to his disconnect from whatever taut and tangled narrative is playing out at the Glover house.

' But look,' he says as the nib of his pen dances over some unfortunate student's clumsy expostulation on the habits and life-span of silk worms, 'I don't see why I'm supposed to mind less than you about watching her manufacture obstacles to having a life of her own.'

'No one supposes that,' says Persis. She is nestled into the lesser of the two sitting room armchairs that flank the fire, and aided by the lapdesk and charcoals, is patiently rendering Symp as he sleeps in the other –and superior –chair, having made a burrow out of a Hudson Bay blanket. 'As it happens I know about as much as you do. You're under the impression she's actually said something about it to me.'

'Hasn't she?'

'No,' says Persis. 'Not about that anyway. Not outright.' She looks up from sketching Symp's twitching nose, pauses, considers and asks, 'were you expecting her to?'

'Not exactly,' says Carl. 'I don't know. I thought she might. Nina always used to.'

'Nina was never much for love affairs in the first place, and what few there were I don't remember her taking much to heart. I shouldn't have said they were comparable at all. What made you think of it anyway?'

'Well,' says Carl, abandoning any pretence of making headway with the essays, 'she was hardly likely to be so worried as all that on our account. It was that or Fr. Cameron was ill, and I thought if that were it you'd have known and said something about it.'

Persis smiles. 'It really was a guess then.'

'Call it a hypothesis. Ever reliable scientific method,' says Carl with a grin. 'What else did you think it was? Mia's frightfully hard to read.'

'Not so hard as that,' says Persis, resuming her drawing and catching Carl's smile off him. Then, in an effort to be enlightening she says warily, 'she's not been sleeping.'

Carl relaxes, gratified that whatever else Mia has been of late, she is at least consistent in her evasiveness. He must say some of this aloud because suddenly Persis is saying, 'no, really, she hasn't been sleeping. She meant it when she told you that.'

'She did talk to you then.'

'I think it's an impossibility that Mia not follow a promise through, Carl, or carry out any injunction given her. But she made no mention of being in love with Victor Cross. I don't imagine she will either.'

'I can believe that,' says Carl, settling back against the table and extending his arm along its edge in such a way as to seriously jeopardize the continued residency of the term papers on their perch. ' I had a deucedly difficult time learning as much as I did from her earlier. I don't suppose I'd have thought of it at all except that she was reminding me frightfully of Una when she wanted to keep her heart close.'

'I thought you were away when all of that was unfolding?'

'When –oh yes, I suppose I was, then. No, I was thinking of Walter.' It occurs to Carl belatedly what he has let slip and he shakes his head sheepishly against the inefficacy of his ability to keep a secret from Persis. It does not matter, apparently she has already unearthed this particular one in the course of one of their visits to Greengage Close, because she says now, 'I hadn't realised you knew.'

'I didn't think anyone else did, except Mother Rosemary. The point is that watching Una was like watching a sparrow watching a cat –looking, looking away, and then back again while affecting to do none of those things. Does that make sense? Mia's the same, and she's every bit as conscious that she does it as my sister was.'

'Yes,' says Persis. 'Though I don't see why the sentiment should be all on Mia's side.'

'I don't think it is,' says Carl, tapping impatiently at the haphazardly stacked term papers and toppling them onto the floor. 'That's what I mean about manufacturing obstacles.'

Further conversation is made impossible by light but persistent tapping at the front door.

'Fr. Cameron's knock,' says Carl to the floor where he is gathering the papers together. Another moment and the former priest has let himself in.

'Ah,' he says, taking in the spectacle of Carl and the papers and Persis by the fire with lap-desk and drawing things in evidence, 'I'm interrupting. You don't mind, do you?'

'Not at all,' say Carl and Persis together. Fr. Cameron takes them at their word and makes his way through term papers and across the room to the fire.

'You'll not object to me borrowing your chair, now, will you Symp?' he asks of the owlish looking cat as he displaces him. Symp bridles at the movement as he is shunted into the corner of his chair, then stretches and climbs up onto Fr. Cameron's lap, more silvery than ever in the last of the April light.

'We weren't expecting you,' says Persis as she relocates the lap-desk, giving up on the sketch of Symp for the time being and rising to make tea. 'We thought you'd be at church.'

'So I was,' says Fr. Cameron. 'We made quite a thing of the stripping of the altar. You'll want to see it before Saturday, my dear, it hardly looks like the same church. Vestments gone, and altar hangings, candles too, the lot. Happens every year and every year I forget how bare it looks without all the usual trappings, like a great gaping hole ready to swallow the presiding priest and servers. But it was all over not long ago. The service, I mean. I came back with Mia and Rev Cross, then thought I'd look in on you as I went back.'

'Fr. Cameron you're plotting,' says Persis from the kitchen.

'Plotting?'

'Pet phrase of hers and Nina's,' interprets Carl. He has resurfaced from the floor, ream of essays ostensibly organized, albeit untidily. 'Probably would be in Mia's lexicon too if she knew the application. Has its origins in your French House days, doesn't it?' says Carl over his shoulder to Persis as he shuffles the papers to neatness and sets them on the dining table. This accomplished, he comes and perches comfortably on the arm of the sofa that divides dining table from would-be sitting room. ' She thinks you're meddling,' he says to Fr. Cameron by way of elaboration.

'Ah,' says Fr. Cameron, 'now I wouldn't say that. Not exactly. You young people have time enough and world enough that you can take things slowly. I haven't.'

When Persis and Carl rush to contradict them he raises a hand placatingly and stretches out leisurely in front of the fire. 'It's no good you arguing,' he says. 'Time's been generous to me, I've had ever so many more years than my Biblically allotted threescore-and-ten.'

Father Cameron smiles and steeples his hands under his chin. 'It's not meddling, surely,' he says comfortably, his voice full of the warmth of the fire, 'if I only want to see Mia happy? Someone ought to, you know, and her mother, though I really shouldn't say so, won't take the trouble.'

It is difficult to argue with this. Fr. Cameron observes their silence, and pleased by it, resumes his old theme. 'And anyway, it hardly counts if everything's well on it's way to being accomplished.'

'Is it? That makes a pleasant change,' says Carl.

'It is if there's no earthly reason –and there isn't –you couldn't have stayed to tea at the Glovers'. Mia wouldn't have minded.'

'Not at all,' says Mia, catching only the end of this conversation as she lets herself into the house.

'Mia,' says Fr. Cameron, surprised by the suddenness of her appearance, 'what's become of our curate?'

'He's gone to save Fr. Martin going out by night with the things for house communion,' says Mia, coming and settling at his feet. 'Besides, you never thought I'd leave all the recounting of church news to you?'

As Fr. Cameron is considering his answer, Symp abandons his place on Fr. Cameron's knee in favour of burrowing under Mia's arms, where he encounters difficulty because suddenly the understanding that got Mia through Oxford catches up with her and she crosses her arms tightly across her body and says to Fr. Cameron, 'you've been plotting, haven't you?'

Symp butts his head against her elbows ineffectually and on meeting no compromise, widens his great, owlish eyes and mews pathetically.

Fr. Cameron looks helplessly at Carl, who is a perfect picture of amusement, apology and surprise, as Fr. Cameron says, 'I thought you said it wasn't a phrase of Mia's?'

'I didn't think it was.'

'It's not for nothing I read English, you know,' says Mia, corners of her mouth twitching with suppressed amusement and acquiescing to the demands of an aggrieved Symp. 'It's possible to collect all sorts of words that way. Persis, can I do anything at all useful?' This all in one breath. Persis says she can stay where she is and occupy Symp, lest he take it into his head to stage an attack on the biscuits.

'Don't tell me you aren't glad to see me?' says Fr. Cameron, assuming an injured air. He is almost a good actor; his eyes are too sincere to do the part justice, and they are laughing at his own affectation.

'Never that,' says Persis as she reappears with the tea tray and setting it on the low coffee table before the fire, smiling at their guests.

Mia laughs and shakes her head, 'I might ask you the same question. I'm afraid I've rather crushed one of your flights of fancy.'

'He was just agreeing you were quite capable of negotiating your own life,' says Persis.

Mia strokes Symp's ears and says softly, 'well I'd hardly like to argue that point, certainly not if you're all united against me. '

'Oh I don't know,' says Fr. Cameron, 'you're rather good at holding your own, if memory serves.'

' _Years_ ago,' says Mia for benefit of the others. This time she really does smile and her eyes flash warmly.

Fr. Cameron does not appear to notice. He has fallen down the rabbit-warren of memory, and is now happily reliving a kind of rememory –the residual almost tactile ghost of a memory primarily composed of Mia's St. Hilda's room where he had sometimes called in for tea on mixed china; Aviemore knocking elbows with Dresden Rose and Spring Violets. They hadn't all been St. Hilda's scholars of course, he remembers, and he had appreciated that mixed company because their keenness and quickness to unravel everything from Augustine to Marvell to the tangled ideas of William Blake had had a rejuvenating effect. And anyway, he had enjoyed taking the one chair in the room and presiding over them, content to be forgotten until his opinion was wanted to decide some especially sticky point.

'You wore colours then,' says Fr. Cameron suddenly, almost struck by the most vivid of these memories.

'Hm?'

'At St. Hilda's,' says Fr. Cameron impatiently, 'you wore colours. Greens and golds that brought out that light in your eyes and showed them to devastating effect.'

'I'd hardly have said that,' says Mia.

'There, you see, I wondered if you noticed. I didn't _think_ you did.'

Mia looks appealingly at Persis for help, but it is a lost cause; Persis is enjoying too much this rambling remembrance of Fr. Cameron's to intervene.

'If I did, I could hardly say so,' says Mia, deciding abruptly that the best thing she can do is humour Fr. Cameron in the hope he runs out of reminiscences in short order. Gracefully, Fr. Cameron concedes the truth of this and extends a hand to Symp, who ignores him in favour of nuzzling his head under the crook of Mia's arm.

'You might wear them again you know,' says Fr. Cameron, 'they suited you.'

Again Mia makes an effort to catch Persis's eye, but she is pouring out tea and so fails to notice.

'I'm sure I can conjure people to agree with me,' says Fr. Cameron happily. He nods benevolently in the direction of Carl, still perched on the arm of the sofa and idly swinging his legs, dragging his feet across the rug.

Carl accepts a tea bowl and says cheerfully, 'well don't look to us, we wouldn't know.' They wouldn't either, he realises as he says it; Mia in his memory inhabits greys and tweeds that make no demands whatever to be noticed.

'No,' says Fr. Cameron, 'I thought you might not. No, I was thinking of those well-spoken admirers.'

'Oh,' says Persis. 'Were there so many?'

'Don't, you'll encourage him.' Somehow Mia manages to make this sound at once like an injunction and a petition.

'Well now…no, not exactly. I'd not have said that,' says Fr. Cameron, pleased at having found a way of bringing his friends into this remember-when. 'Only a handful.'

'Hardly,' says Mia dryly. 'There were two, and neither counted.'

'Ah,' says Fr. Cameron thoughtfully, 'didn't count how?'

'You tell me,' says Mia, 'as you know so much about it.' There is an archness and playfulness in her words that is unlike her, but apparently very like the Mia that Fr. Cameron remembers and associates with St. Hilda's, because he smiles broadly, like a cat that has found the cream, as the memory is made flesh.

'Shan't,' he says, green eyes twinkling enigmatically. 'If you really don't know then it's not for me to tell you.'

It is not until Fr. Cameron and Mia have gone and they are lying in bed, Symp curled protectively at Persis's feet that Carl asks with equal parts playfulness and deductive interest, 'what _do_ you two talk about for so long, if not feelings and what have you?'

' _Not_ the innermost workings of Mia's heart,' Persis says emphatically, and strictly speaking, this is true. Though it would not perhaps be untrue to assert that Mia's worry over the rash of nightmares she is ministering to and her unarticulated feelings, such as they were, were becoming ever more intertwined. There is no good reason to air this particular confidence though, and Persis finds herself saying into the still of the night, 'even supposing she had told me anything of the sort, I still don't see why you think I'd part with the details.'

'I don't particularly,' says Carl. 'The woman I fell in love with wasn't at all in the habit with parting with secrets so willingly. I'd expect nothing less. I'm curious, that's all.'

'And a little worried?'

'How could you tell?' She has not even had to look at him. Even if the room with its pitched ceiling were not too dark to make reading his face impossible and it is – she is lying on her side, looking away from him and out the window towards the Glover house.

'Oh that's easy,' says Persis sleepily but apparently happily, 'your voice catches when you're worrying and trying not to. It's almost a glottal stop. This is still about Mia?'

'Both of them really,' says Carl, deciding his best hope of keeping up with her will be to ask no questions about such linguistic nuances as glottal stops and keep to the point. 'Not Mia so much as him, I think. Mia's got more nerve than she credits herself with, and people to remind her. But Victor Cross…I know what that's like, or I think I do.'

'Did he say something about it?'

'No, Mia, who didn't seem to have much to go on. Something about horses, she said.'

'Yes, that's right, he's dreaming about them.' Persis feels more than sees his wince as Carl's eyes squeeze shut against her shoulder.

'Dreaming would presumably be the version of events that is all light, bright and sparkling,' says Carl, striving for levity. He doesn't quite succeed; a memory –of Lucy flashing white across the mud –intervenes and lends shade to his voice. Anyway, he finds it hard to believe Mia Glover is doing the metaphorical equivalent to hand wringing over a lot of dreams. Nightmares on the other hand –he has no trouble whatever swallowing that idea. In fact he finds it unnervingly plausible.

'It was hard on the animals,' he says into the thick cotton of Persis's nightdress. He shifts slightly to ease a crick developing in his neck and is struck suddenly by that fragile, fresh and residual smell of hyacinth on her skin even now.

'It was hard on anyone who wound up in the middle of it, I've decided,' Persis says softly, her words partially swallowed by the comforter she has drawn up to her chin.

'That's about right,' says Carl, still trying unsuccessfully to make light of the situation. This time his voice betrays him utterly, dissolving into a verbal shudder, or perhaps it is one of Persis's glottal stops. He doesn't know. In the end it is easier, more bearable if less stoic, to ask of the space between Persis's shoulder and collarbone as he inhales that lingering hyacinth scent, 'do you ever think that in the course of fighting for our world we squandered our portion of goodness?'

It is good, Carl thinks, as he leans his head against her shoulder, that in this new life, full of its colleges and church services and even its unreadable term papers, it is possible to trust even a part of a worry to someone else. It was not so long ago that mired in mud and noise one hugged a worry close and kept it pent up until it passed over or killed the person cherishing it.

'No,' says Persis. She reaches over her shoulder and sweeps hair away from his forehead. 'If that were true we wouldn't be here like this, there wouldn't have been even the chance of new beginnings.'

'There's sense in that,' says Carl, grounding himself in the sound of her voice and the smell of the hyacinths, becoming sleepy in spite of himself, his curiosity mostly staunched.

'Of course there is. You watch; it will come right in the end. These things always do.'

'I'm holding you to that,' says Carl, relaxing as she threads an arm around his shoulders.

'By all means.'

'Good,' says Carl comfortably, 'that's good.' He closes his eyes and thinks as sleep threatens to overtake him that he has trusted her with more important things than this before. Things more tightly coiled and tentative in their construction, his hope that they would in fact get through the terror and the uncertainty of the war, and his heart not least of these. It is safe, even reassuring to fall back on her assurance now in the dark of the bedroom with its sloping ceiling and its all-encompassing blackness, and the lingering smell of hyacinths still clinging to her skin. Hyacinths, Carl remembers vaguely, brought him through the war –possibly Lucy too. He's never been sure about Lucy, except that she used to wait as eagerly as he did for those letters covered in candle wax and scented with hyacinth. He could do worse than to trust to it, and to her again.


	16. Chapter 16

_Another longish chapter, I'm afraid. Thank you as ever for reading and/or reviewing. Knowing you find the story engaging is always heartening._

* * *

Easter comes to Oxford, and especially to the congregation of Mary Magdalene church, with much circumstance. The women on the flower rota have worked what amounts to a small miracle between the late-night vigil and the Sunday service to furnish the church with flowers. After six weeks of nothing but greenery by way of decoration, they take full advantage of the renewed concession to flora in church. Further afield the cherry trees are out in snowy flower, and along the Isis and Cherwell the willows are waxing green and trailing their fronds in the water, while the poplars are statelier than ever.

At the Glover house the holiday has temporarily breeched what has begun to feel like a rash of nightmares and ill-luck, and put colour back into the house's inhabitants. With the exception of Mrs. Glover they are surviving on a ration of sleep but this does nothing to alter the fact that as Carl comes up the walk there is bright and bell-like laughter escaping the kitchen window on the heels of _come ye faithful raise the anthem_ in Mia's guarded treble. It is such an ebullient, gladsome sound, that for a moment Carl stands leaning against one of the pillars that decorate the front door, his cup running over, listening to the sound of it. Victor takes the anthem up too, and though his voice is better used to canting the psalms and last night's Exultet, he still seems to be unconsciously anchoring the melody. Then hymn gives way to softly spoken conversation and alert again, Carl resumes his errand.

Mia is putting the finishing touches on a simnel cake when Carl lets himself into the house. She is rolling out eleven marzipan balls for the 'eleven that went to heaven' and speculating with Victor Cross as to the nature of the Mass setting the choir will ambush them with, among other things. When Carl raps his knuckles against the kitchen door, her face is open and smiling and she is saying, 'I've always preferred it to Christmas, it's my favourite of our holidays.'

'I can tell,' says Carl, startling them both into awareness of his entrance.

'We didn't hear you come in,' says Mia.

'Not for want of trying,' Carl says, with a thought for the ancient and creaking door of the house, and the elaborate coat-rack that nearly knocked him over when he finally gained the hallway.

'You look well,' says Mia when she has recovered, and her surprise at seeing him there in the house shortly on the heels of sunrise has worn off. Carl thinks he might easily say the same of her; all in gold she looks like nothing so much as some sun-struck and slender autumnal willow. Also entirely too elegant to be tempting fate by negotiating with something so flyaway and devilish as icing sugar, even for almond paste and simnel cake on Easter Sunday morning. Obliquely Carl wonders if he can say this and decides against it. Mia continues to look too, to Carl in the doorway, acutely conscious of the closeness of the kitchen and the easiness of the conversation he has intruded upon, but he is not given time to dwell on any of this, because by then Victor has assumed the role of host where Mia has temporarily left it off as she brushes sugar icing and almond paste from her hands.

'Good news from home?' asks Victor cordially, as he offers his friend a chair. Carl begins to answer, but intuition takes over and Mia impulsively snatches the news from him.

'When?' she wants to know, 'and what have you called her? When were you going to tell us?'

'Mia,' protests Carl, 'you haven't _let_ me tell you.'

They should, perhaps, be wary of Mrs. Glover, whose stick can be heard rattling ominously overhead, on the verge of summoning her daughter and demanding to know why at half past seven in the morning it sounds as if a string orchestra has taken up residence in her kitchen. No one is; they are laughing, and revelling in the luxury of what it is to laugh unconcernedly, without a worry about the future.

'I'm asking now,' says Mia when she's recovered. 'Tell us everything.'

Carl does, because he cannot remember being this innocently happy since before the war, and because even if he could, he can't help himself. In the sunny east-facing kitchen of the rambling Glover house, Carl tells them of the birth of a healthy girl to the Silver Moon people, to be called Sylvia Amelia Meredith. Victor is pleased, Mia quietly radiant, punctuates her happiness by resuming her role as head of the Anglican Inquisition and hurtling still more questions at Carl. Who does she look like, how big is she and how much does she weigh, is there anything they need, can she bring anything round, he does realise he has only to say if there is anything, anything at all she can do. Carl begins to laugh again, they all do.

'Mia,' says Carl in an effort to satisfy as many of these petitions as possible, 'we're not wanting for anything.'

'Do think up something,' says Victor, 'it will please Mia to be useful.'

'If I think of anything,' says Carl, 'and I can't, you shall be first to know.' Then to Victor and only half asking, 'you'll christen her, of course,' because there is never any doubt that he'll agree, and this has always been the tacit assumption. To Mia, he says, 'you'll be another godmother to her? Nina will want to spoil her, you'll have the sense not to.'

'Would you complain if she did?' asks Mia, and Carl concedes that he would not; he has already decided he will fetch his girl the moon if she pins her heart on it.

'Good,' says Mia, 'because I make no promise to that effect. And I'll only do it on one condition.'

'What's that then?' asks Carl, finding Mia to be in the sort of mood that makes it hard to tell if she's in earnest or not. Besides, he's fond of Mia and inclined to be indulgent.

'She is never to use that middle name. For a name I have always hated, it is getting a shocking amount of wear.'

Later, there are any number of explanations offered by the family to account for how Sylvia Meredith acquires her name. As it is never officially settled, it becomes a piece of the mythology that has sprung up around the Blythes, the Merediths and the Fords throughout the annals of time.

'Why 'Sylvia' 'specially?' asks Stuart, peering over Nina's shoulder to read Carl's letter, as if seeking verification of what he has heard.

'Presumably,' says Nina, 'because it's a fresh name and retains the feel and the fairytale aspect of _Rusalka_ while being English. Carl never could pronounce Czech.'

'What's Czech got to do with it?' demands Stuart, settling at Nina's feet, head upraised in anticipation of her answer. 'I thought it was Russia you had roots in anyway.'

'It is,' says Nina, surprised at the tenacity of Stuart's memory, 'but this isn't to do with me at all. It's Czech you need for _Rusalka_ , which was never going to do as a name.'

'But why would it need to?' asks a perplexed Stuart.

Rather than answer, Nina begins to hum the gentle opening bars of _Rusalka_ 's 'Song to the Moon.'

'You remember,' she says, breaking off the melody unexpectedly. 'Sylvia's a name that retains some of the shape of that first phrase, _silvery moon in the great dark sky…_ and the sense of the story, while still being recognisably English. I can't explain it more competently than that, Stuart. Don't ask me to. Besides,' says Nina, as one reasoning aloud, 'it will have not a little, I should think, to do with it's being a name without history. It's not a family name and it has no connection whatever to the war.'

'Why should that matter?'

'My dear boy,' says Nina, pressing a hand to his cheek, 'thank God you haven't the least idea.'

Stuart seems to consider this. His mouth works as he toys with contradicting her. Then he catches Nina's eye, sees the shadow of a memory there, something haunting and unsettling that reminds him of her performances of so many devastated young women and thinks better of it. He says with his usual roguishness, 'I still don't see why the song matters, though, Nina. You've never said.'

Nina shakes her head, the rose-gold of her hair unwittingly catching the sun to great effect.

'I couldn't hope to tell you,' she says, 'I've never really understood, except that it's something to do with their part of the war. All lovers have secrets, I suppose and I've never dared unravel that one. Besides,' says Nina, folding her arms protectively over the letter, 'even if Persis had told me, when have I _ever_ been in the habit of betraying a trust of hers to you, of all the ungovernable people?'

'You're fond of me really,' says Stuart, and he grins appealingly at her.

'Very,' agrees Nina, 'but that's not to say I trust you.'

Mia says it is because of little Sylvia's parents' preference for Shakespeare, and perhaps after all she comes nearest because when Persis finally does find the time to stitch the sort of sampler expected by the universe to be found in a nursery, it is nothing so saccharine and hackneyed as the oft-seen alphabets and worn-out nursery rhymes. There is simply Persis's even copperplate overlaid in split-stitch and Beatrice's laughing declaration _then there was a star danced and under that was I born._

Father Cameron blames Schubert, and so indirectly also Shakespeare.

Asked for an opinion by a tea-bearing Mia, Victor Cross looks up from the sermon he has promised to give at Low Sunday and offers as his opinion, 'it's the etymology, isn't it? I mean, you don't entrust a child to someone as preoccupied with woodland creatures as Carl Meredith and not expect a name that somehow connotes those woodlands. The great thing is that Miss Sylvia's escaped being named for a favourite family of beetle.'

'You're mad to think Persis would let that happen,' says Mia, setting the mug of tea she came in with down on a coaster at his elbow and prodding it gently towards him. She is retreating from the room when Victor looks up again from the sermon to call her back. 'Miss Glover?'

She returns to hover in the vicinity of his desk, her arms folded across herself, elbows cradled in her hands.

'Is there a way of describing the Trinity that does not make it out to be green and leafy?'

'You really must be mad,' says Mia, 'to think I know tuppence about theology.'

Victor Cross ostensibly returns to the Low Sunday Sermon. 'I'm sure that's not right,' he says evenly, his tea growing tepid. 'Didn't you come out of St. Hilda's with a double First? English and something?'

'Divinity, but I was never awarded anything. You're thinking of the women students now, who can matriculate,' says Mia, as she makes her way towards the door, reminds him of his tea's existence and adds as an afterthought, 'would a Victoria Sponge work better? As an analogy, naturally.'

'Isn't that in four parts?'

'Treat the cake as a unit,' says Mia, 'it's meant to be.'

'What happened to not knowing tuppence about theology?' asks Victor, but he is by then asking void space; Mia has vanished into the corridor and even then making her way towards her mother's room to see if she can't be useful.

As the question arises over the course of her life, Sylvia will herself attribute the name to an old folksong her father teased her with long before it found its way to radio and was made popular, its refrain _bring me little water Sylvie_.

In the end, it does not matter its providence or origin-story because Sylvia's given name has little role to play in her life. Whatever is recorded on paper and irrespective of her christening at Mary Magdalene on the High, she is Sylvia to none of what she will later call 'her people.'

This is entirely Carl's fault; on that everyone is agreed. He is holding Sylvia when she opens her eyes for the first time, and they are so vividly blue that he cannot help saying 'look at her, she has eyes the blue of scilla-flowers.'

Of course they all look, and the mischief is done; to Sylvia's people she is Scilla everlastingly.

In the days that follow, as spring takes root, there is a steady stream of callers at Silver Moon. Fr. Cameron is never short of an excuse to drop in, often unannounced and equally often with some elaborate gift for Scilla. One afternoon it is a rosewood box with inlaid blue flowers that plays Lehar's _Vilja-leid_ at an improbably high but charming pitch, another it is a velveteen cat with the same owlish ears as Symp to guard her cot, still another occasion sees the likes of _Peter Rabbit_ and his ilk securely in a box under his arm, 'because of course,' he reasons, eyes gleaming, in an appeal to Carl, 'she'll have your taste for all God's creatures, and Mia would never forgive you if you didn't begin reading to her early.'

When Carl and Persis look dubious but gratified Fr. Cameron's green eyes smile and he says, 'come, you mustn't spoil my fun. It's been a long while now since I had anyone so receptive to shower fine things upon. Mia, you know, has never let me do it. I begin to think she never will either, that shall be all our curate's part, you watch.'

Faced with such a genuine application there is nothing to do but yield gracefully, which they do, even if Persis can't resist reissuing the old objection to interference she and Carl have ever issued on Mia's behalf.

'I'm not interfering,' says Fr. Cameron, glorying in his self-appointed position of beneficent grandfather or perhaps great-uncle, 'I'm merely observing. Easter's made all the difference, hasn't it?'

He takes Scilla in his arms and chatters away to her in his voice like a song, gently lilting and whispering of fairy. Always the beginning is the same, _two hundred years ago…_ and always Scilla, who has never heard anything like it before, is utterly charmed. She laughs, unwittingly pleasing him, and he says with satisfaction, 'there, you see, our Scilla agrees with me. Mrs. Glover may yet find herself short of someone to keep house, and that, you may tie to. It is also, though perhaps I oughtn't say it, exactly as it should be.'

'I promised your Nina I'd make a fuss,' he says on another afternoon, pausing in his homage to Scilla and looking keenly across the room at her mother, 'as she can't swoop in as she'd like and lavish attention upon our Scilla. So you see, I've an obligation to fulfil.'

'I'm sure it's a far better thing you do by keeping it,' says Persis and trying not to smile.

'Oh yes,' says Fr. Cameron with mock gravity, 'someone ought to. It isn't in Mia's character, and I don't suppose it's much of a habit with Rev Cross either or I mightn't meddle so much.'

Then Persis does smile; she cannot think of a circumstance wherein given the option, Fr. Cameron would abstain from meddling. Besides for once Fr. Cameron appears to have misread Mia. She proves quite as gifted as Fr. Cameron at finding excuses to be at Silver Moon when she wants them, which is often. Not all of Mrs. Glover's headaches, colds and maladies –and she is beset with many that spring –succeed at keeping Mia very long away from her friends. That spring she is all greens and golds and so far as Mrs. Glover is concerned, as elusive as water. She comes round with a casserole, or a pie, or to try and take the laundry away from Persis.

'You can't,' she says as if this were some universal and incontrovertible truth, 'do everything all of the time, and you know I like to be useful.'

When they overlap, she and Fr. Cameron compete amicably for Scilla's attention, and when he is not there she is more than content to yield Persis the territory of her own kitchen again in return for a quiet half-hour with Scilla, who makes nothing like the demands of Mrs. Glover and secures a portion of Mia's attention that her mother can only conceive of capturing. She is content to sit close by the fire, hunter Stewart shawl over her shoulders and Scilla on her arm as she rocks her to sleep, observing once in wonderment –and it is only the once but it leaves an impression –to Persis, 'she sleeps so peacefully. I've never seen anything like it.'

She is wrapped protectively around Scilla when she says it, guarding her, Persis catches herself thinking, from some intrusion the rest of them have failed to anticipate. In the warm glow of the fire, her hair spilling freely over her shoulders, Mia looks more like a watchful child than ever as she folds herself into the corner of her chair and cradles Scilla to her. Watching them with an eye to drawing them like that, Persis sees for the first time since Easter the shadow of a worry at the corner of Mia's mouth, the anxious glimmer like starlight in her eyes.

'They've come back, haven't they?' says Persis.

Mia smoothes Scilla's downy head and says without ever looking away from the child in her arms, 'I told you –I couldn't –I can't make them stop. I think they will always be there.'

'Better or worse, do you think?' says Persis though even to her the question feels absurd.

Mia smiles, shakes her head, and draws an indistinct tracery on Scilla's small palms without seeming to realise she is doing it.

'You tell me,' she says, as she disappears into unplumbed recesses of her chair, her feet tucked so far underneath her they are not even discernable in the shape of her skirt, her posture closed and cured as she bends over Scilla. 'Does my beginning to be in love with him make it better or worse?'

'Only beginning?'

'No. I've begun to let myself. I suppose it comes to the same thing. I couldn't tell you now how or when it happened, only that I can't do any more about that than I can about the nightmares.' Shakily she exhales and says, 'I never meant to get so caught up in them, or care so much.'

'We never do, I think.'

'I always used to imagine the war was wholly separate,' says Mia, still very much to Scilla, still tracing nonsense on that child's palms. The light featheriness of the touch appears to tickle her, because softly Scilla begins to laugh, a burbling like a bubble that underlays their conversation and any other time might hold them rapt. 'It isn't at all like that though –it's bled into everything. I can't remember how to live, or fall in love without the spectre of it appearing from somewhere. I don't remember even how having got that far, these things start. They must though; you managed that even in the midst of the war. Tell me, how's it done?'

'With a tremendous leap of faith,' says Persis.

Mia considers this, bites the inside of her lip and says, 'and if I haven't your bravery?'

'You have though, you know, and so much more besides. I couldn't do what you are, and without hand wringing, wailing or declarations and all the rest.'

'Give me time,' says Mia wryly, her eyes flashing and betraying something of that carefully concealed wit. 'I can't promise Shakespearean dramatics, but a kind of staid and unmoored nervousness I can just about guarantee. I'm not convinced I'm not there already.'

The next moment she is sincere again, dropping a kiss on Scilla's forehead and saying to her as much as to Persis, 'thank goodness you, at least, won't know anything so harrowing.'

Scilla, pleased at the attention, gurgles her assent.

Victor Cross calls too, but as Carl observes to Persis one evening, 'It's not Scilla he's watching, have you noticed?' He is sitting under the coverlet of the bed trying by lamplight to parse the latest and most treacherous batch of term papers, which are balanced precariously on his knees. Students' handwriting, he has earlier observed to Persis, deteriorates with each term that brings final exams closer, and the rule is bearing out.

Persis, winding the music box of Fr. Cameron's for Scilla, owns the idea has occurred to her before now. Her attention though is visibly elsewhere, focused seemingly on taking in the details of Scilla's face, almost as if she were going to draw it, the delicate nose emerging from stubbiness, the vividness and the steadfastness of those wide, trusting eyes, her mouth which has precipitately learned to smile.

For a moment Carl abandons his efforts with the term papers, content to watch them. ' I suppose,' he says with a playfulness worthy of Stuart Ross but no less sincere for that, 'I suppose he's realised that motherhood would suit Mia, what do you think?'

'Where angels fear to tread, my love,' says Persis, who was never very far away. 'I think you're dangerously close to interfering. Mia's more than capable of garnering her own happiness.'

She begins to gather her hair into a plait for the night. Luminescent in the lamplight it looks like nothing so much as a golden cord and Scilla, not quite asleep reaches for the ends spasmodically, her fingers opening and closing drowsily. Carl catches Persis's eye and says half seriously, half with his old incurable humour, 'you're right of course. But you must admit, mine's an interference that ranks a _little_ better than the sort Mrs. Glover runs.'

Persis bites her lip to check a smile and never leaves off twisting her hair into its braid.

'Aren't you even the least bit curious to see if courting by apology is the sort of technique that leads to anything?'

This time he does provoke her to smiling and then to laughter, and the sound, silvery in the lamplight, mixes with the Lehar on the music box. Scilla, inquisitive even in her drowsiness opens her eyes at the sound, but they her moments later by capitulating to the heaviness of sleep.

'To hear Fr. Cameron talk everything's in hand,' says Persis.

'I'm far more interested in what you think,' says Carl. Persis secures her hair with a ribbon and sweeps the resultant braid over her shoulder with one hand and makes no answer.

Instead she slips under the covers and says as she lays her head on his arm, 'will you tell me something?'

'Of course,' says Carl, absentmindedly running his fingers through the golden weave of her hair. In the glow of the lamplight it looks almost like sunrise.

'Anything at all?'

'You're about to test that theory, aren't you? What is it?'

Persis is silent so long that Carl begins to think she has fallen asleep. Then she looks up at him and says carefully, 'about Lucy. At the end of the war –I mean, before you came back –what happened?'

'What made you think of that?'

'It seemed important,' says Persis. 'I think if I could understand that I might be helpful to Mia. Does that make sense?'

Carl considers this. 'I think so,' he says at length. 'You mean then you'd know something of what it's like, keeping ghosts at bay?'

'I've been trying to do that for years,' says Persis quietly. 'What I mean is it's hard to be an anchor when you don't know what you're guarding against.'

The hand that has been combing through Persis's hair stills and Carl closes his eyes against the sudden memory of Lucy. Lucy running towards him like a fury, or perhaps a star, head thrust forward, her eyes great wells of trust even over the low and deadly whistle of the shell. It sounded like a kettle coming to boil, Carl remembers, and remembers too with almost preternatural physicality, the feel of Lucy's paws on his shoulders, great ungainly and muddy paws, not at all playful as they threw him off-balance, but purposeful. This last, Carl thinks as he blinks away the memory, is impossible. He is imposing on Lucy knowledge he acquired only after the fact. And yet she threw him into the mud and licked his face and looked so _pleased_ –there is no other word –so _proud_ of what she had done that it is an easy mistake to make, because Lucy had loved him, and Lucy had saved him and she had nearly killed herself to do it.

If that were all the story was, Carl thinks, if it were only a piece of accidental heroism by an all white German Shepherd who had obeyed his every word, he would perhaps be able to recall it without shaking, without feeling Lucy's paws on his shoulders, might even be able to tell Persis, who is still curled cat-like against him, her feet icy against the back of his knees and her head warm and golden securely pressed against the crook of his elbow. He _ought_ to be able to tell her, he realises, because after Lucy, she is the only other person he can imagine taking that risk, and the idea is every bit as unsettling as the memory of Lucy taking it.

He can say none of this though, because it is a memory that is inextricably tied to so much else, to the mud and the noise and the doom he had felt himself to be under, except of course on those moonlit evenings when he sat with Lucy and she leaned her head on his shoulder and they read over Persis's letters with their smell of hyacinth and their pockmarks of wax.

'I know it's a complicated, uneven story,' says Persis, apparently understanding more than he has given her credit for, 'I know it's long and the beginning and the end bleed into some other, broader, messier whole, but I want to try and understand, even if it's only a part. Tell me the end –that's what matters I think. Lucy and the end of the war and how you came back to me.' She is patience softly and lovingly iterated, Carl thinks, and when she looks up at him again, eyes gentle, incurious, and waiting, it occurs to him that she is right, it is Lucy that matters most in this painful and bloody narrative, and the story of Lucy is perhaps one he can tell her. He may have to take a spoon to his veins and split them open to do it, but it can be done, might even, he concedes, be necessary.

'Not like this though,' he says, more to himself than to her, 'not with the lamplight as if it were ordinary. I don't think I can tell you and be able to see, both at once.'

This is absurd, of course it is, but Persis does not say so. She lies there, curled and expectant, as he puts the light out and takes her in his arms the easier to tell the story of Lucy.


	17. Chapter 17

_I think I've resigned myself to the fact of longer than usual chapters so hope to be forgiven. I do as ever appreciate the time you make to read or review this story. Without you it would have nowhere to go._

* * *

Spring gives way to summer and brings with it the return of Nina to London. She is wanted this time for Tatyana, _and it is gratifying,_ she writes to Persis, _to know that after years of my martyred Marschallin and Mozart's heartsick Countess, someone thinks I can still convincingly carry the part of a lovesick girl of 16. Certainly I've made enough of a habit of those roles as to have mostly given up the idea of singing really young girls anymore._

 _I said as much to Stuart over tea and he laughed and said, Stuart-like, 'but Tatyana suits you, Nina, she always has.'_

 _Stuart though, suffers under the touching delusion I can sing anything given the opportunity._

 _I flatter myself I can still sing Tatyana at least; you know I'm always at home with Russian, and anyway I cut my teeth on the part, so if nothing else I'm in a fair way to remember what her variety of unconscious innocence was like. You'll have to give me a hint as to how to bear her heart though; I'm not one of Stuart's conservatory sopranos and love like hers was always your portion, not mine._

 _I wouldn't dream of it_ , comes Persis's answer, written in a snatched half-hour while Scilla sleeps. _I can remember your Tatyana and it broke my heart –I venture everyone else's too –at the time, no advice wanted. I'll thank you not to make a worse mangle of it this (third? fourth?) performance. Goodness knows it's not a role you're unfamiliar with, and you always leave me wanting to weep. Stuart can be as interfering as any Puck, I know, but he does sometimes stumble across something unnervingly like truth; I'll be daring and say this is one of those occasions._

She is not wanted, however, by Covent Garden until early in the Michaelmas term, which is why what Carl terms hyacinth-season finds her at Oxford station, scanning the platform for Carl and contending with a barrage of questions from Stuart Ross.

'Are you sure we've come to the right place?' he asks anxiously.

'I have made this trip before, you know,' Nina says.

'I know, but how can you be sure this is right? It all looks the same.' Stuart peers wide-eyed and curious around the platform. It is August and tall stalks of errant Brooklime, Cranesbill and Valerian are discernable growing up through the railway ties. The smell of them, heady where the late train has crushed them in its passage, comes back to them on the wind mixed with the acrid smell of burnt coal and steam.

'To begin with, the conductor called the stop. For another,' says Nina, inclining her head to cover her amusement and raising a hand in greeting, 'Carl's come to fetch us.'

In the event though, Carl misses them, and it is not until Nina has linked his arm through hers saying, 'you're mad, you know, to trust Stuart with anything half so important as your Scilla,' that he registers they are there.

'Nina,' says Carl, turning to her, and trying not to laugh, 'where did you come from? I was watching for you on the right and everything.'

'He _can_ trust me,' protests Stuart as they begin to make their way out of the station, 'Ken will tell you. I've not done anything so terrible to his children.'

In his keyed excitement, Stuart is more than ever like the little boy the others remember. He darts ahead of them, and comes running back for reassurance on points of direction so often that he thoroughly and no doubt unwittingly casts off the part of the aspiring gentleman, so that more than once Carl turns to Nina and raises his eyebrows as much to say, _this is the terror that has been plaguing you for months and was so unmanageable?_

Nina does not deign to answer, would not, Carl suspects, even if Stuart were not mere feet away. Instead she pushes strands of gold hair loosened by hours of travel out of her eyes and says with all her old warmth, 'tell me everything. Pictures aren't nearly good enough.'

'Good lord,' says Carl, affecting to groan and pull a face, 'not you too. Mia's forever complaining we don't tell her nearly enough –and she's only next door, at least in theory. She's pretty nearly taken up residence in the inferior chair in the sitting room, and it's just the same with the others. What will you do to me if I tell you to be glad there _were_ pictures?'

There follows a silence of assumed stiffness in which Nina tosses her head, though her eyes shine. It lasts all of a moment; in the end she laughs the golden laughter of their acquaintance in 1916, thereby resolving the question. 'You'd never have gotten away with anything half so lunatic,' says Nina.

'No, probably not,' says Carl as Stuart comes bounding back to them.

They pass the rest of the walk in idle tourism, pointing out to Stuart any number of significant landmarks, over which he nods enthusiastically if not always attentively. The Pitt Rivers with its war canoes and totems briefly rouses his interest, but the next minute he is tearing off again, down the road, round the corner. He calls over his shoulder as he goes, 'is this the way?'

'And I thought,' says Nina, 'that you and Persis were unforgiveable, taking to this place in weeks. He's been here _minutes_.'

Carl laughs. 'I shouldn't worry,' he says, 'Oxford's not city enough for Stuart, not humming and bustling and busy enough. You'll get him back, see if you don't.'

They are arrived before Nina can say this is not at all what she means, the others waiting for them in the open door of Silver Moon, Symp conspicuously and inconveniently sunning himself on the pavement immediately in front of the house the better to impede their journey, Scilla nestled deep into a sling across Persis's chest. She opens her eyes wide and uncurls her fingers on hearing them approach and charms Nina and Stuart as thoroughly as she has the others.

'She's little,' says Stuart in wonderment.

'They always are,' says Nina indulgently. 'You,' she says to Scilla as she bends to kiss her head, 'are lovelier than the pictures make out. I told you,' this to Carl, 'they weren't nearly good enough.'

They go through into the house, talking at once, dispensing with all the auxiliary gossip that wouldn't fit into letters.

'How was _Salome_? Ken sent us the review –Are mother's roses still the talk of the neighbourhood? –When did you last see Ken, and Rilla and little Owen, the other children too? Where are they living now?'

Nina does her best to answer; _Salome_ was a success, Leslie's roses are magnificent as ever along the border between the houses, little Owen is growing nicely, his grandfather's latest book is a triumph, Ken and his family are on Front Street within walking distance of _The Globe_.

'The harbour too,' says Persis, 'Gil will like that. The fishermen probably know him by name by now.

Nina has a spate of questions all her own that they do their best to answer.

Then Fr. Cameron asks, eyes gleaming, 'will we finally get to hear you sing Mimi, now the part's free?'

'What,' says Nina laughing, 'because an Australian soprano has retired? Are you mad? She'd haunt me, and even if she didn't, I haven't the voice for it –and if I had,' seeing Fr. Cameron and Stuart both about to protest, 'I wouldn't dare brave the comparison.'

'I dunno,' says Stuart recklessly, as he accepts a tea bowl from Persis, 'I expect you'd survive.'

'So do I,' says Nina comfortably, 'that isn't the point. There's a reason the part was hers, and it wasn't only sheer possessiveness. Mimi suited her.'

'Not at all like your Marschallin then,' says Stuart.

'No, certainly not,' Nina says. Gingerly she picks up her tea bowl and sips from it. 'She's hardly mine. I'm not nearly self-sacrificing enough. That's all your part,' and she nods to Mia, who tries ineffectually to protest the veracity of this testimony.

'I wouldn't say that exactly,' she says, picking up the round and long-handled tea strainer and turning it between her fingers, mindful to keep the long unfurled leaves, like so many green caterpillars, from spilling onto the table.

'I don't know much about the Strauss,' Victor says to no one in particular, 'but I'd have said letting go of old wishes came to about the same thing?'

'There,' says a gratified Fr. Cameron, 'you see? I knew I wasn't the only one to notice.'

'No one ever said you were,' says Persis, seeing Mia unsure of where to look and trying to smooth over the uncertainty of the descending atmosphere.

Stuart senses it too, she supposes, because it is the only logical way in which to account for what follows. Setting his tea bowl down on a coaster of whirled Edinburgh glass, he walks round the table until he is hovering at Nina's elbow and striking a theatrical posture launches into what Persis half-recognises as some early duet from _The Merry Widow_.

'Don't be absurd,' says Nina when she hears him, 'whatever made you think of that?' She sounds equal parts amused and startled.

Stuart shrugs, that elegant, practiced gesture of Nina's that he has so exactly learned to mimic. 'Humour me?'

Against all odds she does, effortlessly assuming the part of Natalie with her curious mix of coolness and tenderness, even while sitting at the round Maplewood kitchen table, hands wrapped around an enamel tea bowl. It makes a striking scene, Stuart's restiveness competing with Nina's statuesque stillness, a sedateness that not at all undercuts the fire, spirit, and even archness of her voice as she sings,

 _Beware of me, for verily, it's perilous to play with fire._

 _One fatal day, you'll look away and suddenly be in its power..._

In Persis's memory Stuart remains that nervous boy who scuffed his shoes against the church pews while he waited to audition for the St. Paul's Cathedral choir on Bloor Street. In this moment though it is easy to understand why Nina has said for years he will someday find himself singing opposite her. Ably he rises to meet Nina with a lyricism and impetuousness that colours the music as he sings,

 _Stop warning me, informing me, that's not what I require…_

Listening is infectious, so much so that they are all taken by surprise when the music runs out. Victor is leaning back in his chair, eyes half-closed; Mia has frozen with her tea bowl halfway to her lips, the red and gold enamel dragons that decorate it effulgent in the afternoon light. Carl has threaded his arm around Persis's shoulder, not so much listening and watching this scene as remembering another. It is Fr. Cameron, nodding with approval, who ventures to break the silence.

'Now that _was_ well done,' he says. 'When do we get to see it performed properly?' He looks like a boy who is keyed up in expectation of a much-anticipated treat.

'It rather depends on you,' says Nina over her shoulder to Stuart, who is leaning against the back of the sofa, his arms crossed.

'Carl reckons you can't be convinced to stay abroad. What do you say?'

'Dunno,' says Stuart laconically. 'I hadn't really thought.'

'No, of course,' Nina indulgently says, 'too busy climbing through windows and getting into scrapes.'

Stuart grins, his teeth and eyes sparkling more than ever.

'If the Lehar ever _did_ come to anything,' he says, carelessly dodging this accusation, 'I'd've thought you'd want to sing Hanna? She gets much the best of the music.'

'There, you can be clever,' says Nina good-naturedly, 'you're learning.'

Their visit is a golden one. On shimmering afternoons clamouring with the song of ebullient thrushes and sparrows, they set out in a party to revisit the botanic gardens and show Scilla the backs of the college gardens with their verdure and picturesque wildness.

'There's nothing like the brickworks or the Rosedale ravine of course, and we don't have your reds and golds when the season turns over,' says Persis to Stuart one afternoon in Magdalene gardens, 'but we make up for it in shades of green, don't you think?'

They are walking through a field of variegated greens as she says it, patches accentuated into lushness and others beclouded by the shade of overhanging branches. Here and there daisies, stray poppies and little knots of scilla or buttercups stand out among the multiplicity of greens. Overhead a glistening berry occasionally deigns to contrast the sun-soaked luminescence of the leaves.

'Never was much good for noticing that sort of thing,' says Stuart with a shrug as he breaks off a willow wand from a tree and swishes it through the long grass.

'Well you needn't convince _me_ ,' says Nina. She catches at her hair where the breeze has teased it loose and secures it behind her ears.

''Course not,' says Stuart with a grin. 'England made a convert of you _ages_ ago, Nina.'

'I shouldn't like to say, at least so far as Canadian colours go,' says Victor, 'but for our part, I think we do long dappled grass rather well.'

'And the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun?' asks Mia, 'what about those?'

'Well,' says Victor, hesitating. He pulls a flowering grass stem from low by the bank of the Cherwell and begins to flatten the tapered bud between thumb and forefinger. 'I've never yet found those.'

'What is it,' says Stuart breathlessly as he scampers to keep up with Persis and Nina. They have turned off the riverbank and are walking briskly across the grass.

'What are we doing?'

'It's drier up this way,' says Nina lightly.

'Thought you'd like the view here, that's all,' says Persis.

'Which is it?' asks Stuart.

'Both,' say the women together, though Nina can't help looking expressively at Persis, as much to say, _even little Stuart Ross couldn't be coaxed into acquiescence with talk of scenery, what makes you think he will be now_?

'Hadn't we better tell the others?' he asks, sitting down on a grassy slope and idly turning sun-filled daisy between his fingers. A ways away Victor has abandoned the desiccated grass stalk for a blowy open-eyed poppy. He hands it almost carelessly to Mia.

'I've an idea from Fr. Cameron you're rather good at pressing them,' he says, the words carried up the hill to the others by some innocently intruding breeze.

'Hm? Oh they'll catch us up, I should think,' says Persis to Stuart as she sits down beside him and settles Scilla more comfortably against her chest. Nina joins them, spreading her skirt out like a blanket and tucking her heels under her so that she appears watery and comfortable in yards of flowing cornflower cotton, elegant, neat and cool on a Sunday afternoon and part of a past that is waning.

'Like the ideal book about nothing, aren't they,' says Nina, watching the walking party through shielded eyes.

'That sustains itself upon itself,' says Persis more to herself than the others, 'yes, I suppose you're right.'

Stuart understands none of this, and is not listening very attentively in any case.

'I don't know that one,' he says to Nina, catching sight of the sheen of a brooch at her collar, a fretwork and enamel cluster of flowers that shimmers where the sun strikes silver.

'Where'd it come from?' He aims for and misses neutral interest by inches.

'Yes,' says Persis, 'what are they? Forget-me-nots?'

'Something like that,' says Nina vaguely, a hand going to the brooch, her thumb tracing the shape of it. 'Bluebells possibly. I'd forgotten I had it on. Here,' she says, taking the daisy from Stuart, 'you'll stain your hands green that way.'

She says this belatedly, and without any concern for her own hands; already the pads of Stuart's fingers are dyed by the bleeding colour of the flower stem in the August warmth. Humming faintly, Nina begins to gather daisies together, twisting them into a chain.

'Purcell?' asks Stuart.

'Strauss.'

'I might have guessed.' He lies down in the grass and looks up at the drifting clouds, one hand haphazardly shading his eyes against the sun.

'You know me better than that,' says Nina as she threads flowers together. 'No one else writes that well in waltz time.'

'Could you tell?' asks Stuart of Persis. He uproots a daisy and tosses it Nina's direction. It falls gently onto her lap and she finishes the chain with it then weaves the ends together.

'You know I can't,' Persis says, smiling.

'Naturally not,' says Nina, 'it's all a wash in watercolours to you, it always has been. There,' she drapes the garland over Scilla's head. The petals brush against her ears and her cheeks as they settle, making Scilla laugh a light, lyrical rippling like birdsong, and reach for Nina, her fingers closing around the silver-and-blue brooch.

'You though,' Nina says as she disentangles Scilla's little fingers from the fretwork, 'are going to have a voice like a bell someday.'

'Do you think so?' asks Mia, catching them up at last, drawn by the sound of Scilla's laughter.

'Yes,' says Nina, 'she's definitely one of mine. A proper soprano, see if she isn't.'

Other, quieter days, Carl takes Stuart out exploring along the rivers Isis and Cherwell in search of bugs with names Stuart can only half-pronounce and the others won't attempt. Declining to join them, and failing the to see the virtues in crawling under ferns and growing sunburnt watching for minnows while trying not to cast a shadow on the water, Persis, Mia and Nina convene at the round and undecorated maplewood table of Silver Moon that dominates the front of the house, situated as it is in what in a larger home would be an entrance hall and talk over the clatter of the cast-iron tea bowls as they work on a christening gown for Scilla.

It is one of these still, and tranquil mornings that Victor Cross crosses over the walk from the Glover house to join them. He comes with a sheaf of paper under one arm and a scattered fragment of poetry on his lips.

 _'…_ _Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express_

 _The greater heaven in an heaven less_.'

He stops abruptly on finding the three of them at the table, lawn and sewing accoutrements spread out like a sail before them. It is Mia, without ever pausing in her sewing, who picks up the thread effortlessly,

 _In how coy a figure wound,_

 _Every way it turns away:_

 _So the world excluding round,_

 _Yet receiving in the day,_

 _Dark beneath, but bright above_

 _Here disdaining, there in love._

 _How loose and easy hence to go,_

 _How girt and ready to ascend,_

 _Moving but on a point below,_

 _It all about does upwards bend_.

'Marvell. You do know things that run to unconcern then. I'd begun to wonder. What made you think of it, ' she asks, poetry giving way to curiosity. 'Or was it a sermon idea?'

Unnoticed, Nina lifts her eyebrows expressively. _I've missed this and you've not said,_ the look she gives Persis says as understanding catches up with her.

Victor, loose paper in hand joins them at the table, failing to notice or else not caring about the sewing that disconcerts Carl and Stuart.

'I wondered if you'd be here,' he says to Mia, 'you weren't in at the house and there was an idea I wanted to run by you.'

They fall to unraveling the intricacies of what it means to set a limit on charity, Persis and Nina all but forgotten.

'It didn't lend itself to letters,' says Persis apologetically to Nina as they work.

'No? I should have thought love-affairs were exactly the sort of thing that would.'

'You tell me,' says Persis, lightly tapping the brooch at Nina's collar. 'You never _did_ say where it came from, not a word.'

'If I wrote you the details of every gift I received,' says Nina with amusement, 'you'd be complaining I sent you nothing but lists. Tell me what's happened here while I've been in Toronto. Something, evidently.'

'Well…'Persis considers the length of thread she has drawn out, decides it is too long and reels some of it back onto the spool. Nina tilts her head enquiringly.

'You're seeing the uncomplicated part,' says Persis in the end.

'Are these things ever simple?'

'No, of course not. But it hasn't always been metaphysical poets, that's all I mean.'

'Hardly that,' says Mia, slipping seamlessly back into their conversation, adding playfully, 'I didn't think poetry was your subject.'

'Not so intuitively and comprehensively as it is yours,' says Persis, 'but I remember a little. Aunt Anne would never forgive me if it were otherwise.'

They are laughing when Carl and Stuart return, laden with jars that chink against each other in their canvas bag, each containing some indeterminate insect.

'What have we missed?' asks Carl, curious.

'Only a lot of church shop,' says Victor with a wave of his hand. Carl, who has not seen Victor because he is too far out of his line of vision, startles a little on hearing him there at the kitchen table.

'You're braver than I am,' he says when the surprise has passed. 'Do they not put you in mind of the Fates, sitting and sewing like that?'

'Not especially,' says Victor abstractedly. 'Except –I mean –isn't it one of those general maxims that all excellent women sew?'

'Not in Canada, not that I've heard,' says Carl. Now that he's in the midst of this scene he has no trouble noticing the mesmeric effect of Mia's darting silver needle has on the curate.

'Well no, you wouldn't have,' says Mia, 'it's one of Fr. Cameron's nonsenses, that.' She continues sewing, unaware of or else well used to being watched so closely –Carl can't decide –and looks at Carl with eyes quietly lucent with humour. 'You're quite right not to take him seriously about it.'

'Why do I have no trouble believing that?' says Nina. She laughs, and then says, 'besides, Victor's far too good at what he does to subscribe to anything so classical and superstitious.'

 _Except at night,_ Persis catches herself thinking, and from the lurking disquiet in Mia's eyes, the same thought has struck her.

'I'm curious,' says Persis, 'which of us is which?'

'I shouldn't like to say,' Carl says. 'Much safer to stick to Victor's theory, I think. What say, Stuart?'

'Far too willfully good for Fates, surely?' says Stuart, who has been hovering between door and table indecisively. Carl draws up a chair and joins the others at the table, the sewing and its accoutrements notwithstanding. This decides Stuart, who settles behind Nina's shoulder, his hands resting lightly on the back of her chair.

'Dear boy, that is exactly the right answer,' she says as she takes his hand and draws him round to the front of the table with the others, 'but you needn't hover like a tethered kestrel. Come explain about whatever errand you were running. Carl won't have the English, only the science.'

'She's almost certainly right, you know,' says Carl to Stuart.

'It was only spotting a lot of insects,' says Stuart with a shrug as he relaxes into his chair. He gestures expansively at the massy lawn and says, 'what's all this?'

It is so completely the gesture of an actor that it takes enormous effort not to laugh at the theatricality of it. Somehow though, Persis stifles the impulse and says, 'a gown for Scilla.'

Stuart considers this, nods and says, 'yes, I suppose it's good enough for Scilla. White for Eastertide?'

This last is directed at Mia, whose attention is visibly elsewhere. It is the slight pressure of Victor Cross's hand at her elbow that appears to recall her and cause her to register what it is Stuart has said; it must be because her smile is first for the curate, consolatory and apologetic, before it is for Stuart as she says vaguely, 'yes, and the cherry blossoms.'

'I should have said that both those things had passed,' says Carl. 'Not that I'd know, I only grew up in a manse.' He grins, daring the others to take him seriously.

Stuart only half-rises to the challenge, singing nonchalantly, _loveliest of trees, the cherry now…_

'Butterworth did suit you then,' says Nina, 'I wondered.'

'It was your idea,' says Stuart laughing.

'I never got to hear it,' Nina says reasonably, 'and you never wrote; I had no way of being certain. Sing it properly?'

Stuart glows with the unexpectedness of the request, and straightening his shoulders and rectifying his posture, he begins to sing. It is more melancholy than might be expected from Stuart, and he evidently knows it because afterwards he shrugs and says, eyes gleaming, 'Nina was trying to make me serious.'

'When wishes are horses,' says Nina affectionately, and not, to judge by the warmth in her voice, wholly sincerely. There is no doubting her though when she smiles at him and says, pleased, 'you've become very good at what you do, Stuart.'

'Do you think so?' His eyes are round and lambent in delight.

'Have you ever had unearned praise from me?'

Stuart shrugs gracefully, the smoothness of it at odds with the clumsiness of his voice as he says, 'I suppose not. I hadn't really thought.'

'No, well,' says Nina with affection as she straightens his collar where some fern or branch earlier creased it, 'I've had a suspicion that's proved true of much of what you do. I hadn't considered it ran to my advice too.'

Her eyes, when they catch Persis's are shining like suns.

'It's not,' Stuart is quick to say. Then he catches the smile at the corner of Nina's mouth and relents. 'Sing something?' he asks. 'Turn about is fair after all?'

Graciously she does, forbearing to tease him further and the afternoon slips away like a dream. The cast-iron tea bowls continue to jabber against the Edinburgh glass of their coasters, and in good company and music, it emerges, time is capable of whirling away faster than ever, their best efforts to stop it notwithstanding.


	18. Chapter 18

_Thank you all for reading and/or reviewing. I know these things take time, and I'm grateful to you for investing in this story._

* * *

'You'll break his heart, Nina, if you're not careful. He's devoted to you.' Stuart has gone out to explore the last lingering vestiges of the Lamas Fair or Persis would not venture to raise the subject. Possibly it comes of being a singer, or youngest in a family or both, but Stuart has always been, in Persis's memory, a sharp-eared boy.

'You're under the curious impression I'm anything _but_ careful,' says Nina. She is lying stretched out on the floor, the wine-red of the silk she is wearing saturated with firelight, one hand lavishing attention on Symp's folded but silky ears, the other ballasting her like a pillar as she watches over Scilla. With her hair unpinned and spooling over arms and shoulders it is difficult to discern in the firelight where the rose-gold of her hair stops and the auric down of Scilla's curls starts.

'He's young enough and impish enough that he's decided he knows what he wants and can't help ignoring a cautionary tale when he's told one. Anyway,' Nina says with an elegant lift of her shoulders, 'I shouldn't worry overmuch about Stuart. Give him a year or two and one of those conservatory sopranos will bewitch him enough that he'll dare to fall seriously in love. He won't think of me at all then.'

'Do you think so?'

'I'm almost certain.'

'But not quite,' says Persis.

'It's difficult with Stuart,' Nina says, 'he's serious perhaps two minutes together at a given moment, sometimes not even that. For a given value of certainty and confidence though, I'd say that's more than likely. He's coming out the other side of school, and I'm a familiar face in a world that isn't always easy or friendly. He'll find his feet and that will be the end of that.'

Persis nods, choosing to ignore the implicit _I hope_ contained in this last speech of Nina's.

'I'll trust you. It's your world and you understand it. I don't expect I'd mind so much if it were anyone else. Carl and all our Island people, they most of them had younger siblings. Stuart's the closest thing I've got to anything like that. Ken of course never allowed of much protection, and ghosts, even ones you make playmates out of, certainly don't.' She rubs her arms against a sudden fit of shivering that overtakes her.

'Stuart wouldn't either if he suspected,' says Nina. She stretches one long, slender arm out and snares a stray shawl from off of a footstool by the fire and throws it Persis's way. 'For for what it's worth,' she says as Persis wraps herself in the shawl, 'I'm as loathe to see him hurt as you are. Why do you think I keep trying to wake him from that daydream?'

Persis hums her acknowledgement of this as she crosses the room for Fr. Cameron's music box that sings the _vilja-lied_.

'I know,' she says as she winds it. 'You're gentle with him, and I know that's not a trouble you always take.'

'No. The others know ours is a world with corners and sharp edges. They can bear it if I'm cold. Stuart though –I feel responsible for him,' says Nina, running elegant fingers through her hair. 'He's where he is because I happened to hear him sing and made an effort to teach him, and he's still finding his feet. Gentleness is a concession I owe him, though he wouldn't care to here me say so. And there are moments,' she says with a graceful lift of her shoulders, 'where he almost convinces me he means it.'

'Only moments? He's done nothing but convince me.'

'He would. One of Stuart's great assets,' says Nina gently, even tenderly, 'one of the things that will make him such a laudable singer, his audience won't be able to help believing in him. Playing the role of a grown-up though… it's still a role that costs him effort.'

Persis stops winding the music box, and sets it down on the mantles as it begins to play. Hearing it, Nina laughs, shakes her head and says, 'we can do better than that for you, Scilla-flower, surely?'

Absentmindedly, and without sitting up, Nina relaxes her shoulders, straightens her spine, and begins to sing

 _Nun lasst uns aber wie daheim_

 _Jetzt singen unsern Ringelreim_ …

'I'd no idea it was a fairytale,' says Carl looking up from his corner chair, where he has until that moment been working unobserved on shaping an argument about the eating habits of tent caterpillars.

'I had no idea you had any German,' says Nina, laughing and breaking off her music. 'Languages always seemed to be Persis's domain.'

'They still are, and I don't suppose I had when we first met,' says Carl comfortably, blue eyes sparkling. 'That was before I'd spent nearly three years having it rammed down my throat by the enemy.'

'Of course it was, I was forgetting.'

'Well don't stop on my account,' says Carl. 'It's gratifying to know someone can. Besides, you're cheating Scilla of her music.'

'Not only Scilla,' says Persis, still hovering by the mantle, I've missed this.'

'All right,' says Nina, the picture of acquiescence, 'but only,' she says to Scilla, 'if you promise not to take your cue from my vilja and make a habit of bewitching and breaking hearts.'

'I thought it was a fairytale?' asks Persis, as she settles on the rug beside Nina and Scilla in front of the fire screen, the better to listen.

'After a fashion. Mind you, all the best ones have a sting in the tail.'

Persis is forced to acknowledge the truth of this. But if there is a sting in the _vilja-lied_ it is not in the music. Listening to Nina, stretched out comfortably on the carpet, charming Symp and Scilla apparently with the facility of a Loreley, her hair more golden and gleaming than ever in the firelight, years fly away. If it were not for the gentle burbling of Scilla's laughter, fading as her drowsiness gets the better of her, and the expensive susurration of the red silk, it would be easy to believe this was Nina's aunt's parlour some late evening, and they were both young girls again. Then the Toronto Conservatory had been nothing more than an aspiration to Nina, a dream to indulge when the lights were out and they sat up talking by starlight. But then too Nina had lain much like this, all limbs, gold hair and instinctive grace and had sung by the light of the fire, her repertoire a vast unsettled thing as she toyed with what suited and what did not. That musical flexibility has vanished of course, but the ability to sing while stretched luxuriantly as a cat on a sun-glazed windowsill has not. The _vilja-lied_ , which was never a lullaby Persis realises as she listens, is as enchanting as the composer had a right to hope for and when it ends Scilla is smiling in her sleep and the others have forgotten for the time being that there was ever anything so nightmarish as the war to wrack their souls.

Stuart comes back while Nina is singing, letting himself into the house with uncharacteristic quietness. He stretches out leisurely on the sofa, eyes bright with residual excitement, hair windswept and cheeks flushed red as the yew berries in ripe blossom on the hedge in the back garden. That he is brimful of things to tell them is obvious, but all he says when the music has stopped is, 'sing something else Nina.' In his buoyant excitability, tinged with the first traces of tiredness, he turns this suggestion artlessly into a petition.

'What takes your fancy,' says Nina. She must have registered his entrance, because his speaking doesn't surprise her at all, though it catches the others off-guard. Stuart reaches his hands over his head lazily, considers, yawns, and curling up against the cushions of the sofa says guilelessly, 'It's too late for dramatics, and anyway, Scilla's 'sleep. You choose.'

He's right, it is far too late for theatrics, and Scilla, lying on her back, her hands balled into half-curled fists, is snuffling softly in slumber. The surprise is that Stuart has noticed all or any of these things, and now in the flickering light of the fire, is hardly the time to tease him for it. Gently, softly Nina begins to sing Strauss's lilting _wiegenlied_. The music ravels outward, cresting and ebbing like water and listening, it is easy to understand why popular myth has it that this music is written with her in mind. Even this unobtrusively rendered it brings out all the sweet spots of Nina's voice, a sound rich, warm and caressing as a sunburst. By the time the song has spun itself out, Stuart, like Scilla, is asleep, his face open and unprotected in its dreaming.

'I suppose we ought to wake him,' says Persis, sparing a thought for the stairs, narrow architectural afterthought that they are.

'He'll be all right,' says Nina. She rises, retrieves the Hudson Bay blanket from over the back of an armchair and drapes it around Stuart, tucking it close at the corners instinctively.

'He'll have a crick in his neck tomorrow,' she says as she straightens and surveys her work, 'but I don't suppose he'll be any the worse for that.'

They begin to make their way up the treacherous stairs, Persis with Scilla in her arms, Nina with one hand to the wall to brace herself against the possibility of falling over the far edge into darkness and the hard wood of the floor below. At the midpoint, Persis stops, one foot hesitating between stairs. She is squinting into the darkness over the uncertain edge of the stairs at the sleeping shape of Stuart Ross.

'You're sure he'll be all right like that?'

'Certain.'

'I worry about him,' says Persis unnecessarily, shifting Scilla slightly in her arms so that her daughter's head rests against her shoulder.

'I know,' says Nina, and even without looking at her, Persis can sense that she is smiling. 'It won't be the most uncomfortable night Stuart's spent though, not by a long way.'

'How can you possibly know a thing like that?' Persis wants to know, whirling perilously round in spite of the narrowness of the stairs. Nina shakes her head, laughter in her eyes and blossoming at the corners of her mouth.

'He knows I won't scold,' she says affectionately, 'and that I keep late hours. Auntie's house at Huron and Sussex makes a better haven when he's in a storm than South Drive.' She shrugs with that old, inbuilt grace. 'You don't need me to tell you Stuart can talk for king and country. He talks more than ever when he needs rescuing.'

'And do you have much luck?'

'What, talking sense into Stuart? Does anyone? I'm beginning to be quite the expert at reassembling conservatory sopranos though. But really,' she says, her voice suddenly faltering in tiredness, 'I thought I'd had done with that sort of thing when Ken gave it up as a bad idea.' It is hard to be sure, but it seems, in the dark of the stair, that Nina smiles ruefully.

'You miss him, don't you?'

'Who? Stuart? Tree climbing, adventure-chasing, dog-teasing, bright-eyed boy that was so desperate to be a soldier like Carl? Goodness yes. Every bit as much as you do.'

When they leave –Nina for London and the part of Tatyana, Stuart for Toronto –a flatness settles almost palpably over Silver Moon and the Glover house. Fr. Cameron haunts them keenly as if searching for lingering traces of the music he has so enjoyed having on his doorstep. Mia comes round on the heels of their departure to see if she can help with the washing-up. She persists against Persis's objections saying, 'it's always the worst part of a leave-taking, the last reminder they've gone.'

It being impossible to contest the veracity of this, Persis capitulates and between them they begin to erode the spectral aftermath of what has been a pleasant three weeks.

When Scilla wakes up mid-morning, fretful at the reduced state of her court, Mia picks her up, hands still soapy with the last of the water they've been immersed in and cradles Scilla in the crook of her arm.

'It's only me and mumma now, Scilla-flower,' she says apologetically. 'I'm afraid we're rather poor substitutes after all that borrowed starlight.'

'I am,' says Persis. 'I'm quite ordinary by comparison. You though, you're a favourite with her, can't you tell?'

'Am I? That's all right then. There's quite a lot I'd do for her. Not that though,' she says laughing a little, 'I can't do that for you, flower.'

Persis turns from the sink to find Mia gently disentangling Scilla's mouth from her breast, the baby's head almost perfectly molded to the shape of her breast and the bodice of her dress damp where Scilla has been sucking on it.

'Come here then,' says Persis, lifting Scilla out of Mia's arms and retreating to the shelter of the kitchen table with its protective barriers of well-stocked shelves. Mia, seizing the opportunity darts to take over the last of the washing-up, waving Persis's objection away with 'I ought to be allowed one trick a visit, you know.'

'If I agreed to that,' says Persis, 'you'd never let me forget –you'd never stop _doing_ things for us.'

'One trick,' says Mia, her lips curling in playfulness, hazel eyes flashing like switches in the sunlight. 'I like to be useful.'

Scilla settles to feeding and Mia to the washing up, methodically and efficiently diminishing the stack of crockery that has built up under the surface of the soapy water. They are silent, each wrapped up in thoughts of their own and when Persis next looks over at the sink, drawn by the sound of the sucking of the water downward into the drain, it is to find Mia, tea towel over her arm, eyes starry, abstractedly drying and stacking the dishes on the side of the counter.

'You look as if you're dreaming.'

Mia turns away, face flushed, whether from fancy or the fact of being caught out at such imagining Persis can't decide. She sets the plate –not quite dry –on the stack she has accrued and picking up the tea strainer to empty it, and says, 'I suppose I was a little. She's very easy to love, your daughter.'

'I tend to think so. Tell me, this rule of yours, about the one permissible trick a visit, will it work the other way round? Will I be allowed to take over doing things when it's your children making demands on you?'

'You're looking rather far ahead, aren't you?' says Mia mildly, though she comes perilously close to dropping the plate in her hands.

'No more than you were, surely?'

'Perhaps not. I don't expect it to come to anything, and you do.'

'Whatever makes you say that?'

Mia does not answer directly. She bends with unprecedented attention to the plate she is drying and says lightly, 'it can't though, can it?'

'You're not going to start preaching Roman ideals about the celibacy of the clergy at me, surely?'

Mia grimaces and says, 'do you know, of any other church I probably would. This one though –well it's mine and I think they'd forgive us that particular trespass. It isn't that. If he were to speak, they would never stop wanting to know how –and when –it started, do you see?'

Reluctantly, Persis does see. She has holidayed often enough in Glen St. Mary to know how like wildfire gossip can be, and how little it takes to ignite it.

'Does it matter so much then?'

'Not to me,' says Mia. 'I never used to scruple about what was expected before, you know. So help me, I wouldn't have got to Oxford if I'd stopped to mind about what people thought. It wasn't what well-mannered young girls did, vanishing into cloisters to study. But I was good enough, clever enough not to have to make do with a red brick place –though one of those would have given me a degree for my trouble –and I didn't.'

She smiles, and it reaches her eyes, which glow warm with passing memory.

'It was only afterwards,' she says abstractedly, 'that I picked up suitability like a habit and made it stick. '

'Then why –'

'I'm telling you,' Mia says, ever patient. 'I wouldn't mind the inevitable gossip. That's not the trouble; it never has been. He's salvaged so little of what that war took away from him that I think the idea of costing me whatever essential worth it is that people value in me is a bridge too far. If it can't be managed without damage to that –and it can't –then I shouldn't think he'll ask.'

* * *

* _As ever I"m working from an English translation handwritten into my score, and make no claims on accuracy of the in-text translation of the_ _villa-lied as a result._


	19. Chapter 19

_Thank you always for your reviews, and for reading! It's always lovely to hear from you._

* * *

When Mia wakes at the unforgiving of hour of three in the morning, she initially supposes it is because there is a light on over at Silver Moon. Scilla presumably is awake with something, hunger, an ache, a nightmare. Then she hears the sounds of moaning and the rest becomes instinct. She switches the light on in the hall without realising that she does it and wonders how she was ever tired, confused or perhaps just innocent enough to mistake this for anything so banal as intruders. She relights the candle on the dresser and takes that too. In the hall it is redundant, but she has never yet had the nerve to witness one of these night-terrors by the starkness of electrical light and it seems unlikely that tonight should be an exception. It is not.

The old, unknowable nightmare has seized Victor Cross and he is sobbing in his sleep. As she comes into the room he is saying to the counterpane, ' _hark the foes come_ ,' the words almost obliterated by the raggedness of his breathing.

' _Too late to retreat_ ,' he says and this is even more disjointed. It is the fragmented aspect of the words that Mia seizes on as her defence when it comes home to her fractionally too late that this is Dryden as much as it might also be a memory.

'St. Cecilia's Day,' she says more to herself than the dreamer, and then, in credible imitation of the Dean's crisp tone, 'how you ever managed a degree in English…'

It does not matter and she lets the thought go. The clock on the wall is readable only spasmodically in the candlelight, but it counts the seconds with all the rhythm and precision of a drum. How had that part gone? _The double, double beat of the thundering drum…_? It is warm for September but Mia shivers anyway, grateful suddenly that habit has made her reach for the hunter Stewart shawl from its place folded away in the wardrobe. Victor Cross twists in his sleep, swallowing air in dizzying and erratic gulps.

' _The soft complaining flute…_ ' he manages before the shallowness of his breathing curtails the thought.

' _In dying notes discovers,_

 _The woes of hopeless lovers,_ -yes I know. Only you,' says Mia firmly, beginning to minister to the reality of the moment, 'could borrow Dryden for a nightmare. Anyway, it isn't right, it isn't hopeless. I'm here now.'

Improbably, this seems to work, albeit momentarily. Victor Cross, still with his face buried in the down of the pillow and tangled among the blankets, stills. Then the old battle-cry, of torches and horses starts up.

This is, Mia knows, the beating heart of the nightmare, would that someone would enlighten her as to the why and the how. It might be enough by daylight to be an anchor, a mooring, and all unknowing, but now, in the still hours of the night –or perhaps the morning –the strange in-between place anyway –she is rendered useless. This is especially true of this evening –morning –as Victor Cross twists himself away from the hand bringing him to wakefulness. It is a night-terror in every sense of the word, lividly wrought on the face of the sleeper; eyes wide and staring out into the darkness, seeing _something_ certainly, but not, Mia is sure, any of the things that are there, that are present. Not her, or the candlelight, the _Theotokos_ gift of Fr. Cameron's or anything else, because if he were, his eyes would not be so wide and staring.

The clock on the wall runs off the seconds with impeccable timing, and Victor Cross will not wake up. Like some determined eel he eludes the hand on his shoulder again. He cannot be stilled or reasoned with and the idea of letting the vision run its course does not seem tenable because Mia does not believe for a minute it has an end, only a loop that repeats _ad nauseum_ while the clock demarcates the seconds. She thinks wildly, improbably, of Fr. Cameron chatting so easily with Nina about the Marschallin, about his love of the character, of that unforgettable line of hers, _sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and stop all the clocks –all of them._ The Marschallin might have had the right idea. Victor Cross cries out against the horses and the living torches. Briefly Mia considers opening one of the windows, but dismisses the idea. It will not do any good except to let in the sound of the crickets that he won't hear anyway, and to tell the world there is some crisis playing out at the house. The clock calls the half hour, the seconds still flying away in a hum. _Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and stop all the clocks_ …not that that would do any good. But the unconscionable uselessness is more unbearable even than the clock and Mia makes another concerted effort to wake the curate. The result is little improved on the previous attempt, his shoulders twitch their way out from under her hands, slippery as an elm and seemingly insubstantial with anxiety.

'Dear God,' says Amelia Glover, who does not blaspheme, 'Please. Wake up. You must.'

She begins to unwind the knot that the blankets have become, mindful of the hands that fly out wildly. Feathers silky and soft drift on the wing as a tear in the casing of not only the pillowslip but the pillow itself comes to light. She is smoothing it flat when a hand closes around her wrist and holds it fast. It has all the strength of startled certainty and she sits down on the edge of the bed to wait until it releases her. Instead there is the brush of something against the lines of her wrist –a thumb, a finger, his mouth -it is hard to say. He is cold all over and shivering from it. The clock on the wall continues to count the seconds as they pass. It matters less though, because their obtrusiveness is mitigated by the sound of Victor Cross's voice, thin and feathery as the goose down from the pillow in the bleeding of the sunrise.

'After the rain,' he says and it seems so inconsequential that at first Mia thinks he is still asleep.

'Gorse too. You smell of them. I thought it had to be you.' He is tracing small circles on the inside of her wrist with his thumb. It is rough from writing and endless Mandatums and other seals of a history she doesn't know, and does not feel at all like the fleeting butterfly-wing coolness of a moment ago. It was a kiss he had given her earlier then.

'You were a long time realising.'

'Was I?' Victor brings his right hand up to his eyes and swipes at them; there is no sleep to drive out of the edges only the aftermath of the dream that lingers there.

'I didn't mean to be.'

'It doesn't matter now.'

'It was the horses, you know. I couldn't make them stop. They were –' but here, as ever, he stops short.

'They were in trouble?' offers Mia.

'Something like that.' It is hard to tell; she thinks he smiles over this incredible understatement.

'What would help?'

His fingers are still curled around her wrist, his thumb still rubbing circles against it. 'Stay close, will you?'

'Yes, all right.'

Obliquely Mia registers that the wall clock still counts the rush of the seconds, its voice nothing more than a low senseless murmur. Victor still has her hand; it is trapped now somewhere between his chin and shoulder. It is uncomfortable not for any decorous reason, but for the angle at which it leaves her arm, straining at the join of the elbow against an unseen force. It is easier in the end to lie down on the edge of the bed, on the smoothed coverlet, her arm pillowing her body and her unencumbered hand playing with the wool beads that cover it as she braces herself against an objection that doesn't come.

Instead he begins to shake with the force of sobs that must gall his throat if his riven breathing is any indication. Instinctively Mia abandons the pleated whirls of wool and takes his head in her unencumbered hand.

'Here,' she says gently, 'lay your head, come here,' and draws his head onto her shoulder. Gorse and after-the-rain he had said of her wrists, and she supposes the smell of it will be in her hair too, the last traces of the scent she damped the hairbrush with to comb her hair out for the evening. For a moment it seems he will protest, his body arched taut like a bow; then he buckles with exhaustion and curls around her, head on her shoulder, her hand still encircled in his larger, trembling one, growing warm with contact.

'There, lay your head, if it helps.'

It does help; she is just nurse enough to tell that much. The shaking lessens and the sobbing subsides as his breath steadies; she can feel it warm against her exposed neck where the hunter Stewart shawl has slipped.

'I'll tell you sometime about the horses,' says Victor Cross sleepily. 'Sometime when it's daylight and –I don't know –when they matter less I suppose.'

'Do you think you could?' asks Mia. She is growing tired herself now that the worst part of the night has passed, is in fact treacherously close to falling asleep.

'I begin to think I have to.'

'No,' Mia quietly says. His hair is slick with the seat of the nightmare still and she smoothes it for him, flattens it and draws it away from his eyes. 'No,' she says again, 'you're not obliged to say anything on my account. I'd never hold you to that.'

The sun wakes them both, streaming in through the windows, and dazzled by it, Mia does not at first take in where she is. Then she hears the rhythmic sound of the wall clock and sees the _Theotokos_ on the wall, and the shadow of a crucifix somewhere overhead casting long shadows across the room, and these things bring memory back. Her arm is fuzzily asleep from the awkwardness of its position these last few hours, and so is her shoulder. She retracts them clumsily and is sitting upright on the edge of the bed, rubbing blood and feeling back into her wrist when Victor Cross opens his eyes. He squints against the sunlight.

'You were smiling, was it a pleasant dream?'

'I think so. I can't remember. That's the difference between dreams and nightmares, you know. Dreams are gauzy, elusive things like moonbeams. Nightmares stick.' He looks suddenly confused as he sees Mia properly for the first time since waking, then scrabbles about for an apology.

'I should never have asked…'he begins, and then stops, apparently feeling this to be insufficient.

Mia pulls the hunter Stewart shawl close, and says, 'it's all right. If I'd minded I'd have said.'

She is left with the strong impression he does not quite believe her. Overhead the wall clock offers its opinion, measuring seconds and boldly displaying the time for all to see. On the dresser the candle she came into the room with all those hours ago has guttered in the antiquated holder.

'Popular opinion would have it that you're not in the habit of objecting to things.'

'Fr. Cameron isn't right about everything, you know. Though I'm afraid…' but the enormity of the feeling she is striving to communicate overwhelms her and the thought remains in suspension.

'It will cause all sorts of talk,' says Victor, ever apologetic.

'Will it? I didn't mean that. I'm afraid…'

Abruptly she rises and crosses to the window. The sun floods through the glass enshrining her in an aureola of light, as hard to look at as a saint in some illuminated text.

' _I will very gladly spend and be spent for you, though the more abundantly I love you the less I be loved.'_ Her voice is unutterably soft and weighted; whether she means the words for Victor or some other, far off and sentient presence it is unclear. Then, turning from the window and more distinctly she says, 'I'm afraid there's very little left you could ask of me that I'd refuse.'

* * *

At Silver Moon a letter arrives for Carl with the morning post that causes him to pause longer than normal over his breakfast in consideration of it.

'Anything interesting?' asks Persis.

'I don't know,' says Carl and he is frowning slightly. 'It's the war office or something of that ilk –don't look so alarmed,' he adds, looking up from the letter long enough to catch a glimpse of Persis's startled expression the other side of the table.

'They're only wondering if I'll take on one of the messenger-dogs as was. They've remembered I'm a keeper –was I should say –and this one hasn't adapted to life in peacetime terribly well. They've been shunting her about all these years with no luck.' Carl smiles wryly and says, 'I think I'm a bit of a last resort. They can't think of anyone else and will I chip in the one last time and do them a favour.'

'Will you?' asks Persis, pausing in her attempt to interest Scilla in breakfast.

'I don't know,' says Carl. 'It depends rather.'

'On what?'

Scilla's hands swat at the spoon Persis has been using to feed her and its contents find their way onto the floor.

'Symp partly. Here, give her to me. You'll eat for me, won't you Scilla-flower?'

'Nothing to do with you not wanting to replace Lucy then?' asks Persis mildly, handing Scilla and her breakfast over to Carl.

'Oh, more than a little because of Lucy,' says Carl.

Carl goes out into the garden with the intention not of looking for beetles but of mulling over the question of the proposed rehabilitation of the messenger dog. He is not sure if this would constitute replacing Lucy, and if it is he is not altogether sure he wants to. He does not get very far into this, however, because sitting under the yews is Victor Cross. He raises a hand in greeting and says apologetically, 'you don't mind, do you? Persis said once if I ever wanted anywhere quiet to think…'

'Not at all,' says Carl, sitting down beside him. 'I'm not intruding?' and receiving affirmation that he is not, 'what are you mulling over anyway, your next sermon?'

'No…that's all written up. Quite good I think too –on the unexpected God. I have half an idea to ask Miss Glover to read it through for clarity –do you suppose she would if I asked?'

'I think there's quite a lot Mia would do –and gladly –if you asked.'

'So I'm told.'

Carl raises an eyebrow but does not pursue the idea further. Instead he settles against the trunk of the yew and says, 'right. Not the sermon then. Why so earnest?'

'Only a dream,' says Victor, trying and failing to make light of whatever it is. 'A memory, if you like.'

Considering this, Carl becomes flatter, his usual humour melting into thin air, though he is still smiling gently, sincerely –sympathetically.

'We did go through hell, didn't we?' he says softly.

There is no need for Victor to answer; the truth shivers before them, almost tangible in its intensity.

'That's one way of putting it,' Victor says, not looking at him. 'I don't have to tell you –you'll know what I mean.'

'I can't forget the dogs,' Carl says after a moment. 'They started around when I did, and Lucy was mine. There was so little that wasn't Government Issue –well you know –that that mattered, mattered terribly. She was only a puppy out of Battersea when I got hold of her, still growing you know and she was white as the light she was named for, in a roundabout way, I mean. She should have been named for the moon, but there aren't any English names that conjure the moon, and she was so light and valiant and loyal that in the end nothing else would have suited her. She saved my life –and I think I might have saved hers –nothing roundabout about that. Pushed me into the mud, and lost me an eye but got me home all right. I still wonder sometimes what's become of her, if they kept her on or sent her back to Battersea or what. I wish I knew because I stood for years at the front of the line waiting to catch her, and send her safely away from the firing, and I sent her out into it too; she'd go into the shells for me. She was loyal to a fault, my Lucy, and her loyalty, the letters from Persis and the love that came in them –those things were mine.'

'They don't write about the dogs though; no one thinks to send out letters about _their_ well-being, not even to former keepers. Every now and again you'd get a soldier that took in hedgehogs who'd lost their homes to shells, or nursed maimed rabbits, injured grouse. I befriended the few men like that, and we kept up in our way –at least for a while, after we got home, if we got home –so I knew what became of them. But they don't tell you about the dogs, and I still wake up at ungodly hours on blustery nights and wonder how –or if –Lucy got out of that mess alive.'

He feels Victor's hand alight gently on his elbow before he sees it; Victor has been sitting on his right, and perhaps it is as well. Seeing and reminiscing about the war do not seem to sit comfortably together. As when he confided in Persis, it is easier to tell the story blindly, and this is no less true now that it is the whole story he has parted with. It is a relief to find when he does turn his head and catch Victor's eye that there is no pity or even sympathy there, only a quiet understanding.

'I'd forgotten about the dogs,' Victor says. 'I suppose I heard them barking late in the night…it's the horses I can't forget.'

As silence stretches out between them Victor thinks he hears again the trumpet's loud clamour, the thundering drums, and above it all 'I can still hear the horses screaming,' he says. 'I don't mean in the heat of the battle, not exactly, though God knows that happened enough, their bodies blistered and glowing with tongues of flame that were nothing to do with the Holy Spirit, and the smell of them burning, and worse than that, knowing we had orders not to intervene on their behalf. Some people did of course, and were shot for their trouble if they weren't burned to a cinder themselves. But that…that was awful, but that wasn't the worst of it.'

There is no noise, not even birds in the branches of the yew. Victor presses his fingers into the wells of his eyes and breathing unevenly, resumes the story.

'We were moving along the line, and the going was hard, there was mud everywhere, we were drowning in the filth of it, full of all our own private angers and mortal alarms…and then we came across a mule, heaving about in the worst of the muck. There were shells beginning to take off and we knew we couldn't afford to stop for it. But it had lost its front legs and was suffering God knows what kind of torment… and the drums were going, and the blasted trumpets… and up ahead they were shouting at us not to stop for the some dumb beast because the shells were going and anyway, by then we'd become the kind of people who die for their country but don't give tuppence about the animals. And even if we hadn't, it was much too late to retreat.'

'The mule was trying to get to the feet it didn't have, tossing it's head and thrashing the back legs it _did_ have so wildly that even though I had a gun on me I couldn't have got near enough to kill it, even if I'd had the nerve, which I hadn't. Someone behind me _had_ , but his bullet missed its mark and the mangled mule still wasn't dead. It got so that even _that_ didn't matter; suddenly shells were worse than ever, we began to hear the hiss of them…we'd have heard that deadly whistle if we'd stayed any longer. It became clear if we stayed we'd be all killed. I sent up a prayer that one of those shells would put that poor animal out of its misery and –God help me –I moved on with the others.'

By then Victor is weeping, the memory livid and etched on his face. 'Hell is one word for it,' he says almost inaudibly. 'I knew going off to fight that I'd do unspeakable things –to other men. That was bad enough. I was glad to do it; I don't mean the killing, never that, but aid my country, _greater love hath no man than this_ …and all that. I never thought I'd come out of it alive, it didn't seem possible, not when I was living and breathing death. There were people falling all around me, in the mud, burned beyond recognition, choked on gas, and I never thought… I never thought,' he says, his voice muffled by his hands as he covers his face with them, 'that there would come a day when I'd see one of God's creatures suffering, and turn away from it. I should have gone back, or drowned with it, or done _something_.'

He makes firsts of his hands and scrubs furiously at his eyes with them, sniffling like a child against the after-effect of his tears.

'Those nightmares of yours,' says Carl, 'the ones that have Mia so anxious…'

'You can see now why I haven't wanted to tell her a thing like that?'

'No I quite see that,' says Carl, and he does.

There is part of him that knows Mia is not half so fragile as the world has made her, that she is in fact far stronger than she is credited with. Equally he cannot break the habit of years, the inborn instinct to shield her, and so many others –Persis, Nina, his sisters not least of these –from the sheer horror of war, its brute awfulness. There are things –the whole story of Lucy for instance –that he has until now confided in no one, and has not wished to. Rebuilding the world has meant, for Carl at least, stifling those two and a half years he spent in the war; he can quite see why Victor Cross might be reluctant tell Mia about that mule flailing and drowning in agony.

Overhead rooks and thrushes strike up a chorus, cutting to the heart of the silence that has settled and dispensing with some of the earnestness. Carl idly plays with a ragged grass stem, tilts his head and listens. Victor looks upward into the crown of the tree as if trying to divine the source of the innocent choir.

'Do you know what they are?' it is more absent formality than genuine enquiry, and Carl never gets to answer. They are both diverted by the sudden appearance of a man in black on the doorstep of the Glover house.

'Who's that?' asks Carl with a certain amount of wryness, 'an angel of death?'

In the wake of so much protracted talk of the war the possibility sits uncomfortably near the forefront of his mind.

Victor frowns, plucks a flowering stem of grass and smoothes it between his fingers until the bud unravels and sends crumbling seedheads tumbling onto the lawn.

'The doctor, I think,' he says. 'I suppose I'd better go. It might be it's important.'

'Rather long odds on that,' Carl says with levity. Then indulgently, 'but you'll feel easier for going.'

Victor laughs. 'And you?'

Carl shrugs. 'There's a letter I've got to write.'

They rise clumsily, stiff after sitting so long on dew dampened grass. Carl finds himself brushing stray blades of grass off of his trousers with limited success; they cling perversely to his hands. Halfway across the lawn Victor stops, bracing his hands cautiously against the yew hedges.

'This talk we've had,' he says, 'I'm glad we've had it. There's been truth in the words, or between them perhaps…and it isn't often that happens. People aren't always...comfortable I suppose I mean, talking with a curate. It makes a change.'

He steps away from the hedge, hands prickled all over the palms from the bite of the twigs, and walks briskly across the lawn and turns the corner for the Glover house. Carl takes it as read that they will be appraised in short order of whatever drama Mrs. Glover has constructed, so does not call any injunction of the kind after the curate. Instead he lets himself into Silver Moon through the side door, and nerves himself to write a letter.


	20. Chapter 20

_I'm sorry to have been away -summer in Scotland has come with various projects that have needed seeing to. As ever, thank you for reading and reviewing, it's always appreciated._

* * *

It is not, as it turns out, one of Mrs. Glover's unjustified bursts of dramatics. Carl and Persis learn this not from Mia, but from Victor Cross who slips into the house quietly one October evening and says apologetically, 'you don't mind do you? I have a terrible feeling I'm in the way.'

'I'm sure that's not right,' says Persis, but just as quickly she confirms his welcome.

Carl, struggling to sketch adequately a dragonfly, puts the pencil down and says 'you know, even Mia's given up the idea of apologising for calling unannounced. Any chance we can talk you into doing the same?'

'Oh well,' says Victor, 'well I wouldn't usually…it's only because I know it's that time of year when you have to prepare for the new term.' This is patently untrue; neither Carl nor Persis can remember an occasion on which a visit from Victor hasn't been preceded by an apology for it's happening. Carl says as much and then pushes away the sketch that won't take as a bad job.

'It will keep for another evening,' he says.

'Here, let me have a go,' Persis offers, folding Ken's latest letter from Toronto.

'Would you?'

'Of course. I can worry about Ken and his children another time.'

'That sounds ominous, is it?'

'It's nothing that won't wait,' says Persis. 'Rilla's tired, Nora's precocious and Gil is incorrigible as Ken ever was at that age. Let me look.'

She retrieves the specimen from the coffee table and gingerly transfers it to the lap-desk and begins to make a study of it.

'And Owen?'

'Mm? Oh, Owen's Nora's baby by all accounts and happy as a clam. What exactly is it I'm drawing?' she asks as she goes.

'Only _Coenagrion puella_ A sort of dragonfly,' says Carl, adding this last for clarification. He comes and leans against the back of Persis's chair the better to watch the drawing unravel.

'How are you doing that?' he wants to know. 'I've lost a whole day to trying to capture the shape of it.'

'You're trying to draw all of it,' says Persis.

'Well isn't that how drawing works?'

'Not at all. It's as much about capturing blank space as the thing itself. Does that make sense?'

It does not, and Carl says as much. He looks to Victor for confirmation of this opinion and finds instead that he is being watched with a quiet, even wistful sort of envy.

'You make it look effortless,' he says at last, coming back to himself.

'Sometimes it is.'

They fall silent again, the only sound the faint rustle of Persis's pencil nib against the paper and the low thrumming of Symp's somnambulant purring as he lounges comfortably on the carpet at their feet, belly exposed and vulnerable.

'You might risk asking, you know,' says Carl when he is convinced the drawing has reclaimed the entirety of Persis's attention.

'Hm?' says Victor Cross, startled out of his reverie.

'Mia,' says Carl. 'You might ask her to marry you. I don't believe for a minute that's the first time the thought's occurred to you.'

'No. But I can't very well just now, can I?' says Victor patiently. He has been sitting with the necessary things to draft a sermon before him. Now he gives it up as a lost cause and begins to sketch abstract shapes on the paper instead.

'Whyever not?' asks Carl. It's not nerves, he thinks, because Victor could never have come through the immediate aftermath of the war, the memory of the screaming and mangled horses and the dissonance of that shift back into peace-time without them.

'Not when Mrs. Glover's ill. That wouldn't be right at all.'

'She's always ill,' says Carl reasonably.

'Not like this,' Victor says quietly. He adds a curlicue to the sketch he is growing on the sermon paper. 'She didn't send for the doctor, you know, that was Miss Glover wanting to be sure.'

Uncertain of the best way to process this information, Carl seizes upon the most notable curiosity of the lot, and it is nothing to do with his neighbour's illness.

'What have you done with Mia's name? You've not fallen out?'

'Not at all.'

'Well then what's changed? You were happy enough to use it the other day.'

'Her mother wasn't ill the other day.'

Carl folds his arms and rests his head on his right shoulder as if expanding his field of vision will somehow make sense of logic he suspects of being unique to Victor Cross.

Victor sketches another indeterminate shape. 'Tomorrow I'll be brave and hover unobtrusively,' he says, extending the abstract shape still further into the margin of the paper.

'At the moment though I'm no good to anyone. I'm not usually…I mean it isn't usually me that has to be reassuring. I haven't the least idea what to do.'

'I should have said that was the better part of your career,' says Carl.

'That's different though,' says Victor. 'It matters of course if I get that wrong but it's not the same. There are any number of priests and curates –here especially –who could take over from me and smooth over any awkwarnesses. But this – she's not so interchangeable. I can't afford to get this wrong.'

'Well you might start by being there, and not here,' says Carl not unreasonably. 'It's a big enough house, even with half of it shut up, that you could find some obscure corner to be waiting with a light on in the event you were needed.'

The curlicued shaped on the paper has by this time doubled in size. Victor continues to add to it haphazardly as he says 'I suppose. But it's not the same as it is with other parishioners you know. I don't mean because I'm in love with her, though that's part of it. I mean, as a rule people send for me if they want a word or a visit, and that's not possible what with me living at the house. I'm always there, like it or not. It's partly why I came here. I didn't like to presume I was wanted. I'm not altogether sure I am.'

Carl looks at him incredulously. He can't possibly mean that. He sits on the sofa placidly watching the intricate tendrilled inky shape on the pad of paper grow ever larger under the ministrations of Victor's pen and wonders how to hint that no one, not even Mia Glover, devotes months to ministering to nightmares not her own at unlikely hours of the day out of nothing more than a sense of duty. There is of course, no way of doing this. Even if there were, he is not at all sure Persis would forgive him the transgression in a hurry; Mia certainly wouldn't. Besides, Carl concedes as Victor's abstract drawing begins to curl inwards on itself, sometimes the fact of being in the middle of something can make it harder to read the truth of what one is part of, especially if you have come to be there as Victor almost certainly has, by sheer accident.

'Mia only wavers,' says Carl carefully, 'when she's unsure. I mean she's at her most guarded when she doesn't know where she stands. It's like dancing; you mustn't expect her to lead. She won't.'

'You think I ought to be there.'

'I've been saying so from the beginning. Not,' he adds with a smile, 'that we aren't pleased to see you. But aside from anything else, we're not much good for inspiration.' He taps a finger against the paper still propped against Victor's knee and given shape by a hard-backed copy of Wulfstan's eschatological homilies.

'Neither of us read Divinity at an Oxford college, you see.'

'No. Well. It doesn't matter. Whatever I do about it, I can hardly talk notes on a sermon, can I, with Mrs. Glover ill enough to warrant a doctor?'

'I don't see why not,' says Carl. 'Mia's good at it, and she'll be glad of the diversion. No one can live and breathe illness all the time anyway. It's stifling. Look, you know all this; you've seen your share of it. Why are you letting me tell you?'

'I've told you,' says Victor, 'I haven't the least idea how to be useful.'

'He's not wrong, you know,' says Persis, looking up suddenly from the sketch of the dragonfly. 'The way to talk Mia out of fretting is to talk to her about something else. Ideally get her out of that house if she'll agree to it. She's far more likely to listen to you than she is to me.'

Victor colours, mutters something about the doubtfulness of this and retraces some of the massed curlicues for emphasis. 'I don't know about that,' he says to the paper.

'I do,' says Persis. 'Priests, curates and in another life the Dean of St. Hilda's, rank among the few people who can twist Mia's arm enough to convince her into something she'd otherwise be reluctant to do. I don't qualify at all.'

Carl looks at her admiringly. She has done in a minute, without apparently having to think about it, what he has spent the last quarter-hour trying to achieve. He has, of course, no way of acknowledging this overtly. In the event Persis saves him the trouble of trying by finishing with the sketch of the dragonfly.

'Here,' says Persis, holding the drawing out to Carl, 'will that do?'

Carl takes it and studies it, eyes wide. 'I've missed a trick not asking you to do this sort of thing sooner.'

'I wouldn't have minded.'

'You're one among thousands then,' says Carl, 'which I think I knew before but that proves it. Everyone else _did_ mind.'

Persis laughs and shakes her head against this unlooked for compliment, the gold of her hair gleaming like moonlight in the temperamental firelight. When Carl looks back to Victor it is to find the other man has stood and is stretching, arms cruciform as if in brace against some impending necessity.

'I'll give you back your evening,' he says, tucking the pen into his coat pocket and the paper, with its mass of spires and curlicues under his arm. 'It's been…well it's been a help, talking with you.'

'I'm glad,' says Carl. 'You'll send on our best, won't you?'

Victor gives them his word and then disappears into a night full of late midges and shadows.


	21. Chapter 21

_Thank you for reading and/or reviewing. I'm going to be intrigued to see what you make of this chapter, because I know a handful of you anticipated it but not, I suspect, the handling. As ever, I'll look forward to hearing from you._

* * *

Mia, they discover one morning in November, goes cold from shock. She lets herself into Silver Moon through the side-door, having apparently negotiated the narrow gap between the fence dividing their houses and the lawn with no concern for the yew hedges or her dress; she will later find residual pieces of greenery caught in the seams. Sitting atypically in the parlour while drafting Christmas plans, Carl and Persis hear her well before they see her, alerted to someone's presence by the chatter of the latch on the door as Mia's hands falter in negotiating it.

Carl sees her, and one good eye or not, knows at once what is wrong; it is impossible not to. He has seen shock too often on the faces of young boys after their first battle, the realisation that war is neither great nor glorious newly dawning on them, to mistake it. Even if he hadn't, Mia is white as cream. She has always looked faded, but never yet colourless. He crosses the room and experimentally presses the back of his hand to her cheek as if gauging a temperature. Without a word he takes her by the elbow and leads her towards the fire, installing her in an armchair beside it.

'There's a blanket somewhere,' he says, 'one of the Hudson's Bay ones…'

He stands rooted to the spot while his eyes cast about the room in search of it. It is Persis who finds it badly folded over the back of the rocker and quite out of Carl's line of vision. She hands it to him and he drapes it gingerly around Mia's shoulders.

'Where have you been, Mia, that you're so frozen?' he asks as he comes away.

'Only at home,' says Mia, tucking her hands into the folds of the blanket. For a moment they are tersely quiet. Then Carl recovers his conversational ease and says as if it were quite usual to find guests white with cold on his doorstep,

'I don't suppose we have tea that doesn't need water from boiling?'

'Lots,' Persis says, and disappears to make some up.

Later, with her hands wrapped around an enamelled tea bowl, Mia says, 'she's dead.' Her voice has the stilted air of a child who has chosen its world carefully in an effort to be believed. 'I know she wasn't –I mean there are better loved people here –but she was mine and she was the last of the family I had, and I haven't even her now.'

She begins to shiver, even under the blanket, and some of the tea lurches from the tea bowl she is holding. It leaves behind pockmarks like dew on the weave of the blanket and the backs of her hands.

'I'm sorry,' she says as Persis takes it from her and sets it down. Persis shakes her head against the apology, her hands being occupied with trying to rub blood into Mia's fingers. When nothing comes of it she wraps her arms around her instead and draws her close in spite of the barrier created by the back of the chair and inhales the lingering smell of a fever and sickness that was never Mia's still clinging to her.

'Mia,' says Persis sympathetically, 'when was this?'

Mia presses interlaced hands momentarily against the back of her neck then reaches for the tea, and sips at it, considering.

'I don't know,' she says. 'This morning I think. Earlier maybe. I can't –I don't know.'

'Never mind now then,' says Persis. She begins to smooth Mia's hair with one hand, brushing it back from her face and off her forehead. It is almost as thin and fine as Scilla's.

'Never mind,' she says again, 'never mind.'

Under the wrap of the Hudson Bay blanket with the fire casting shadows across her lap, Mia trembles with cold. Persis continues to smooth her hair, to run it through her fingers. As the worst of the cold ebbs, Mia, her hands pressed against her stomach for warmth, curls up, her head pillowed on the chair arm, and begins to shake with grief instead.

'I'm sorry,' she says again, much later when the tea has cooled, accepting the handkerchief Carl offers her. She scrubs at her eyes with it and says into the cotton, 'I never expected she would die. I think I'd begun to think she _couldn't_. She'd been ill so often, you know…' Mia inhales sharply and uncertainly through her mouth, apparently swallowing the most of another rush of tears. Persis and Carl _do_ know. Mrs. Glover has been ill more often than not since they arrived in Oxford.

'We never do expect it when it's people that matter to us,' says Persis.

'Have you –I mean have you done anything yet?' asks Carl, daring to be practical. This more than anything else seems to refocus Mia, who nods just discernibly, and begins to fold the handkerchief into a mitre.

'Yes. That is, Rev. Cross knows, he's been to see her. He was sitting with her when I came away –I couldn't leave her alone.'

'No, of course,' says Persis.

'I think,' says Mia, collapsing the mitre and commencing a water-lily, 'that is, he's said he'll see to...I don't know exactly. He'll arrange about the funeral and afterwards I think. I ought to do it, but I don't know where to begin or what needs doing or –when father died, you know, there were still people in the house that mother could send on errands to do that sort of thing. And anyway I was in school and you didn't –' she swallows against a constricted throat, her voice taut with the effort of evenness. 'I mean you didn't send children to funerals, so I don't remember…'

Persis stops her with a hand to Mia's shoulder. 'Look,' she says soothingly, 'we don't know a lot about it either, but we're here. You've only got to ask and we'll help.'

Carl, sitting opposite Mia, his hands on his knees, nods his agreement.

'Anything at all,' he says.

Inexplicably, and unlooked for, this proves the catalyst for another shock of tears. Between sobs Mia tries to explain these away but her words are too incoherent, choked and obscured by her crying.

'It will keep,' says Persis, her voice low. 'Don't worry about it now.'

With a wrench Mia undoes the water-lily she has made of the handkerchief and presses it to her eyes. 'I'm being silly about it,' she says when her breath has come back to her, her voice ragged and frayed.

'Mia,' says Carl softly, 'she was your mother. Blood is –well it's blood. It matters.'

Mia nods. She begins to smooth the handkerchief out on her lap, battling resolutely against its inclination towards creasing. 'It's not that,' she says as she presses the handkerchief flat, 'or that's not all of it. I can't –did you mean it earlier about doing anything?'

'Yes,' say Carl and Persis succinctly and without hesitation.

Mia worries at a crease in the handkerchief. 'Would you let me –could I stay this evening?' she asks, the words tumbling from her before she can think to stop them.

'I know it's no notice and I wouldn't ask only I can't face that house alone, I never could. It used to frighten me when I had it to myself as a girl. I thought it would swallow me and now –I told you it was silly. Please can I stay?'

'Of course,' says Persis, gently rubbing Mia's shoulder through the wool of the Hudson Bay blanket. 'Of course. But what did you mean about being alone? You wouldn't be, surely?'

Mia, apparently realising her efforts with the handkerchief are a lost cause begins to fold it into ever decreasing squares. 'I would though,' she says. 'Rev. Cross could hardly stay on at the house with only me there. It wouldn't look right and people would talk, and of course that sort of thing matters.'

There is no condemnation in these words, only recognition of their veracity and a lassitude born of months of sleeplessness and emotional upheaval. The handkerchief bunches in a protest against further folding, and Mia's hands still uneasily.

'But, says Carl perplexedly, 'where will he go? I thought the clergy house or the rectory or whatever they choose to call it hadn't rooms. Wasn't that half the reason they had such trouble getting anyone to do his work?'

For a wonder, Mia smiles. It is a thin and watery thing, but it is also a marked change for the better.

'The rectory has enough space,' she says, her voice warming. 'Fr. Martin only says there isn't because he's a lovely man who's forgotten what a luxury space can be. He likes having the place to himself. It has spare rooms enough for visiting priests. I suppose he'll relent under the circumstances. At least for a little while.'

'And if he doesn't?'

'Oh I expect Fr. Cameron would offer to help,' says Mia. She presses her hands to her eyes and then to her temples as if drawing her grief out by the roots. 'You're sure it's all right if I stay with you?'

'As long as you like,' says Persis. 'There's less space of course, but –'

'Thank heaven for that,' says Mia, her eyes flaring suddenly with a flash of her natural quickness. 'Do you know I spent years terrified of getting lost in that house? It was almost a relief when we had to start closing off rooms. The thought of going back and picking through the furniture, sorting it and deciding what to keep and give away, where to send it…'Mia shakes her head against the enormity of the task before resettling it on the arm of her chair.

'It's alive with ghosts –or perhaps I only mean memories. Though of course,' she adds, 'it will most of it still smell of her. It was so completely mother's house.'

Over Mia's head Carl and Persis exchange a look that suggests this is very much up for debate. As far as they are concerned the house is Mia's, she has by all accounts been running it single-handed for years now. Now though hardly seems the time and the place to say as much.

'We'll go together sometime,' says Persis. 'We'll make a day of sorting through things. I'll help. Not today though. Lie down. You must have a headache.'

Mia concedes that she has and retreats to the darkened corner of the upstairs spare-room.

She is still asleep when Victor calls in to see them later in the day and finds the others at tea.

'I gather you're going away,' says Carl by way of greeting when he sees Victor.

'Only to the clergy house. It's still Oxford,' says Victor and attempts a smile. He looks stretched thin as he sits down in the on the sofa that divides hall and dining room from sitting room and unfolds his legs in front of him.

'Still,' says Carl with a half-shrug, 'it will be strange not having you next door.'

'Nor Mrs. Glover,' says Victor.

'No,' says Persis, returning with a tea bowl for him, 'when did that happen?'

'You know?' asks Victor, but then he nods to himself in silent acknowledgment of this fact and says, gratified, 'Mia did tell you then.'

'Bits and pieces,' says Persis. 'Not what you'd call a full account.'

'No,' says Victor. 'No, well I'm afraid I can't do much better. I don't know much myself. Things got worse all yesterday, or I think they did.'

He thinks this because the ribbon of light demarcating Mrs. Glover's room had stayed resolutely lit all that day, was still lit in fact when Victor had looked up from the office of Compline and turned his own light out for sleep. He had hesitated for a moment, sitting indecisively on his heels in front of the prie-dieu, then resolved, had wound his way through the shadowy expanse of the house and rapped softly on the door.

That had brought Mia to the doorframe, tense with anxiety.

'I'd never seen her look like that before,' says Victor to Carl and Persis, 'her eyes were like saucers, and there wasn't anything I could do.'

In the event, faced with the narrowness of the doorframe and the sudden flood of the electric light, he had said, 'you'll come find me if you need anything? Anything at all?'

Mia had nodded, wished him goodnight and that had been that. It had, in any event, been an untroubled night at the very least; Victor had fallen into sleep sometime before midnight, the house heavy with stillness and an almost viscous silence that seeped through it like blood, the only noise the rhythmic beating of the clock on the wall, counting the seconds like heartbeats.

'And you really expected Mia to ask a favour outright?' that was Carl, more academically curious than critically incredulous.

'Well no,' concedes Victor, ' not exactly that. She had to call in a lot if them the last time –after the war I mean –I know it cost her to do it. It would have put me off them too. But I had thought –that is we've made allowances before that we haven't –wouldn't –make of other people. You do, after a bit.'

'Yes,' says Carl, nodding agreement, 'I suppose you do.'

'So you can see why when nothing –no one –woke me –'

'You were asleep,' says Mia softly from the stair, her own voice still thick with somnolency. She has come down so quietly that they have failed to hear her; she sits now on the bottom stair, knees drawn up to her chest and arms laced protectively around them. 'You looked so restful –I couldn't wake you. I thought it would keep.'

'Then,' says Victor, guardedly, 'you don't mean –it wasn't during the night that she died?'

'Oh no,' says Mia, 'no I don't know exactly when she –when that happened. Only that I was sitting with her, and suddenly I wasn't. So much watching and waiting rather bleeds together.'

'It does,' says Persis, her agreement partially obscured by the knocking of the cast iron teapot against the glass top of the table.

Sensing the knitting together of the women over some shared experience they cannot hope to penetrate, Carl turns to Victor and says, 'when did you find out then? Not last night, I take it?'

'Not until morning,' says Victor.

He had woken up with the sun, and the sound of the crows screeching.

'I went to the window to see what it was,' he says to Carl. 'I hadn't taken in it was crows then and it might have been anything, might have been…' he shrugs clumsily and that it might have been horses, burning in agony passes tacitly between them; Carl never questions why at sun-up there would be maimed and screaming horses anywhere so civilized as under the windows of a North Oxford house. That isn't the point. Victor recognises this absurdity too and shrugs it away.

It had only been a crow after all. There was a superstition to ward against the ill luck of a single crow, the country boy raised on folklore and tradition in him knew that; you rapped wood and crossed your fingers for luck, threw spilt salt over your shoulder to keep the devil at bay, and did _something_ against a single crow, though he couldn't for the life of him recall what.

'Except,' he says to Carl grimly, 'except that there had been a soldier I fought with who used to shoot them before a battle –I remember that, though not whether he did it to ward against evil or their preying on the dead. Even if I _had_ remembered, I hadn't a gun.'

In the event he had crossed himself for good measure and retraced the path to Mrs. Glover's room, where the ribbon of light was still glowing through the sliver of space between door and floor.

'I didn't like to knock,' Victor says to Carl. Somehow, in the time between his falling asleep and waking the room had developed the hush of a church and knocking had become an intrusion. Instead, he had gone in unlooked for, treading carefully, and found Mia sitting in vigil at her mother's bedside. She wasn't asleep, but she hadn't seemed to see anything either.

'The world becomes very small, when you're watching like that,' says Victor Cross, who ought to know, having kept his share of vigils by the side of the dying. 'Anyway,' he says with another shrug to dismiss the looming spectre of the war, 'Mrs. Glover had died by then.'

He had recognised this from the distance of the doorway, had taken in the waxy pallor that had settled over Mrs. Glover and the telltale stillness of her chest, and that had been enough. The heavy calm of the dead was infectious, it must have been. Mia sat like a statue, eyes glassy and in the end he had walked as on heated coals across the room and knelt beside her. It wasn't until he took her in his arms, resting his head against her side that Mia eased and for a moment softened, the void of the grief she had kept in check perilously close to bursting its dam. She felt even then incredibly cold.

'I thought you might want a corner to retreat to,' he had said.

'I do rather. Only not here. I can't. There are things that need doing and I don't know where to start –what to do.'

'Let me then,' Victor had said, meaning it, because he knew how to do that at least, even if he couldn't take the glassy look out of her eyes or chase away the cold of her.

'Please,' had said Mia, only too glad to trust this burden to more competent hands than her own, 'that would help.'

So saying she had extricated herself from his arms and come across the garden to Silver Moon.

'You'll know the rest from there,' says Victor uneasily.

Carl nods in brief acknowledgement of this assertion. He is on the verge of elaborating for his friend when the front door comes suddenly off the catch, and Fr. Cameron is there, walking purposefully through the house with more resolution than any of them can recall seeing in him before, except perhaps Mia, who he gathers up into his arms as if she were nothing.

'There now,' he says serenely, stroking her hair with one gnarled, gnomish hand, 'I've only just heard. Fr. Martin told me. I came as soon as I knew.'

Mia lays her head on his arm and lets him cradle her. 'Of course you did,' she says, her voice muffled against the knit of his sleeve. 'You've always been good to me.'

'Well now,' says Fr. Cameron benignly, 'no more than your due, my dear, no more than your due. You're a rare bird –has no one told you?'

The sight of Fr. Cameron all squashed and compressed on the bottom stair, his knees almost level with his chest, should be an improbable one, but it isn't. He still smoothes Mia's hair and speaks in a hushed voice; he seems almost to be blessing her, whether he is quoting some obscure bit of scripture to her or speaking off the cuff of the moment it is hard to discern and no one tries very hard to find out. It feels such a natural tableau that in the end the others begin to withdraw tacitly from the scene.

Victor Cross rises and makes his excuses to leave. Carl and Persis try ineffectually to dissuade him. For a moment he looks to Mia, still with her head on Fr. Cameron's arm, her hands curled into fists and full of the knit weave of Fr. Cameron's sleeve. Her earlier languor waning, but her eyes are half-closed and she misses whatever cue has been extended to her.

'There are things I ought to do,' says Victor with conviction. 'I'll shut up the house and bring the key round before I go, if that's all right?'

It isn't at all clear if he has intended this for a question, but he pitches it as such, his vowels shorter and flatter than ever.

'Of course it is,' says Persis. Something about the sight of him poised on the threshold of the door wrenches at her and she says impulsively, 'don't keep away, will you? We'd miss you.'

'Yes,' says Carl, adding his agreement, 'all of us.'

Victor dodges this question chiefly by mumbling an answer so faint and indistinct as to be carried away on the November wind, though he raises a hand to them in farewell.

'I'll be about, anyway,' he says, his hand beginning to pink with cold. 'I suppose I'll see you at the church.'

He is gone before they can stress that that is not at all the same thing, shoving his chilled fingers into his coat pockets.

'You weren't wrong you know,' says Mia later to Persis, as she helps wash up the tea things. There is still a palpable air of fragility around her, though the worst of the shock of the loss has abated. Fr. Cameron is there still, lurking in a corner like a benevolent gnome and chatting college life with Carl _mezza voce_.

'What about,' Persis wants to know. She extracts the tea strainer from between Mia's fingers and begins to dry it. Mia rests her hands, still spackled with soap bubbles, on the edge of the sink, her fingers partially disappearing into the water. They play over its surface creating innocuous waves with infinitesimal radii.

'The difficulty of receiving,' she says. 'I never thought there would be –could be –anything harder than sitting through those nightmares but this…It costs the earth and an effort I don't have at the moment.'

'Mm,' says Persis vaguely, enshrouding a tea bowl in the stripped linen of her tea towel, 'it's painful to learn isn't it, the wilful stripping away of layers of yourself for someone else.'

'Only because I love him. '

'Of course you do. If you didn't you'd not be making the effort and the hurt would be less.'

'I know,' says Mia, 'and I'm afraid if I try I will fall to pieces, like some shattered vessel. _There shall not be found in the bursting of it a shred to take fire from the hearth or water withal out of the pit_.'

'It's certainly a risk,' Persis says, 'but you might find that the sharing of grief, and allowing yourself to be loved in return is the thing that keeps you whole throughout.'

'I told you once,' says Mia, letting the water out of the sink and lifting the tea towel from out of Persis's hands to dry her own, 'I'm not so brave as you are.'

'I seem to remember not agreeing.' Persis smiles. 'You'll face your lions when you're not so raw. You always do.'

Mia folds the tea towel over the edge of the basin and says, 'you're rather supposing they'll still be there to face. I'm not at all sure that's right.'

'What on earth do you mean?'

'They've all gone away, haven't they?' says Mia hollowly. 'Except you and Carl and Fr. Cameron. But the people who mattered...' Mia stops, frustrated. 'That isn't what I mean,' she says hastily.

'I know what you mean. They were both at the heart of your world.'

Mia can only nod her gratitude by way of acknowledgement. When she resumes her explanation it comes in nervous fits and starts. 'Whatever window there was –when mother was alive – where things might have come out right, where it would have been…safe I think I mean…if they had —has gone now. It's all right,' she says, with an attempt at a smile, 'it was only ever a daydream of mine to start with.'

'A good deal more than that, I'd have said.'

'Perhaps. It doesn't matter now. I don't mind, you know.'

'Even you,' says Persis resolutely, 'cannot possibly mean that.'

'No,' says Mia, her voice wistful, 'but I'd like to. It would be easier if I could.'


	22. Chapter 22

_With sincere thanks as ever for reading and/or reviewing. I know summer brings a lot more pressing claims with it._

* * *

They do not see Victor Cross again until the days leading up to Christ the King Sunday, that new and innovative date that confirms that somewhere higher authorities than the congregants of Mary Magdalene Church are not the only people to have run out of patience for endless green after 25 Sundays of it. Its existence is a welcome thing but also perplexing; no one quite knows how to observe it.

'What do we do with it?' asks Victor uncertainly of Mia. She is bent over a dress she is working for Scilla, and has consequently missed his entrance into the house. Accordingly the sound of his voice outside the context of the church on the High startles her into stillness, and for a moment she sits frozen. Then she draws the sewing together and Persis, watching her, expects her to flee the room and leave the nuances of Christ the King and its liturgical awkwardnesses in the hands of less qualified people. But Mia only resumes her sewing, and without ever looking away from it asks, 'what do you do with what?'

' _we are done with dogma and divinity,_ ' says Victor to the Maplewood table, whereon he is tracing any number of imperfect Canterbury crosses.

' _Easter and Whitsun past,_

 _The long, long Sundays after Trinity,_

 _Are with us at last;_

 _The passionless Sundays after Trinity,_

 _Neither feast-day nor fast_.'

Mia never stops sewing, though Persis thinks she catches the tracery of a smile at the corners of her mouth as she says, 'I haven't heard that one since college. But you've forgotten the end;

 _An end of tombstone Latinity,_

 _Stir up sober mirth,_

 _Twenty-fifth after Trinity,_

 _Kneel with the listening earth,_

 _Behind the Advent trumpets_

 _They are singing Emmanuel's birth.'_

'And the twenty-fifth Sunday?' says Victor patiently reiterating the question, 'what do we do with it?'

This catches and holds Mia's attention sufficiently that she pauses in her work to look at him in unbelief. 'You never think I know,' she says mildly.

''I don't know,' says Victor faltering, 'no one else does, and you've always known before –it seemed the sort of thing you'd have an answer for.'

The space housing the Maplewood table contracts as Mia searches for an answer and comes up short. It is not the compliment, Persis thinks, so much as the person paying it that occasions this lacuna because before now Mia has ably deflected more florid praise from Fr. Cameron without hesitation, even with playfulness. When she does answer it is without reference to the preceding conversation.

'I thought you'd gone,' says Mia at last, laying the sewing aside. 'I never expected you'd call.'

It is Victor's turn to be struck into stillness; he has continued etching his Canterbury crosses into the table with the pad of an index finger while they have been talking.

'Mia' he begins and gets no further. Cautiously he resumes his tracery and says with more certainty, "I'm afraid I'm not very good at grasping at nettles.'

'Rather better than I am,' says Mia gently as she resumes her sewing. 'I keep _hearing_ her, you know, in everything. What she'd have me do and how, and all the hundreds of reasons why...All I've been able to think since she died is how relieved I ought to be to be absolved of so much stricture, and yet it's felt safer to listen, to comply because so help me I can't - I don't know how to live without it any more.'

Victor's answer is missed by Persis because it is at this juncture she prises Carl away from the cipher puzzle he is squinting at in the paper, and summons to help make tea –an unprecedented happening in the history of the house that is not lost on him.

'But I've never learned to negotiate the kitchen,' he says not unreasonably, as he stands perplexedly in the middle of that room, trying and failing to locate the tea tray as Persis fills the kettle.

'I had the three weeks after Scilla was born to at least try and make the effort, and Mia made sure I made precious little progress.'

It is the recollection of this last that brings things sharply into focus for him as he rummages through a stack of placemats for the elusive tray.

'I thought you didn't hold with plotting,' he says. Then more prosaically, 'is this the right place to be looking?'

He receives a positive and then a negative in dizzying succession, only dimly aware of Persis retrieving the tea-tray from a cupboard under the sink and handing it to him. He sets it uncertainly on the counter, and on her instruction goes in search of sugar.

'Not that any of us takes it,' he says bemused.

'It's the principle of it.'

'What principle? If you're not plotting, why am I suddenly needed here? I can't shake the feeling I'm getting hopelessly underfoot.'

'You're not. You will be if you try to parse the nuances of Sunday Last Before Advent, or whatever we're to call it now. Unless –you haven't actually got an insight on the nature of the thing, have you?'

'Good lord, no,' says Carl, breaking into a grin, 'not a bit. It's all Greek to me, you know that.'

'Of course it is,' says Persis, splashing warm water into the teapot, 'it is to all the rest of us too, that's just the point. It's only existed these last two years; Mia can't possibly have any more idea than the Mary Magdalene clergy about what to do for it, it would never have come up for debate when she attended Oxford.'

'Then why…'asks a baffled Carl, still vainly searching for the sugar they don't make a habit of, but which Persis seems to feel ought to at least be presented as an option to their guests.

'You and I talked over cups of tea, usually about the war, do you remember?' Persis hands him a small ceramic dish full of sugar cubes. Carl nods his recollection if not his understanding.

'As if I'd forget.'

'Church and points of theology,' says Persis, inclining her head in the direction of the unacknowledged lovers at the Maplewood table.

'They'll remember how to talk to one another that way, and it makes an excuse for his calling that even the most vicious gossip can't do anything with –though it won't stop them trying –because nine times out of ten the clergy _do_ go to Mia if they've run out of answers.'

Carl blinks as understanding settles. 'I see,' he says. 'But why shouldn't Victor Cross visit here if he likes? '

The kettle comes to a screaming boil and Persis retrieves it from the hob.

'Because his congregation are an exasperatingly long-tongued lot. _'_

'I don't see what that has to do with it.'

'You wouldn't,' says Persis mildly, 'you've never heard them talk –and I don't mean Mia and I unpicking the refreshments rota in the aftermath of its reorganisation by Mrs Dogget and things like that.'

Carl makes an exasperated noise in the back of his throat that is almost the growl of a provoked dog and rubs the back of his neck irritably.

'For God's sake,' he says, 'Mia's the closest that church is likely to get to a saint; they _can't_ hold anything so human as her love of Victor Cross against her.'

'There's some that might try though,' says Persis, 'and Victor's sharp enough to know it. So's she. Have you found the milk jug?'

'I hadn't realised I should be looking for it. Where is it?' He opens a cupboard haphazardly and inquires of it, 'should I have been more careful about calling on you?'

He emerges from the cupboard pink-eared and without the creamer.

'There was a war on,' says Persis, taking pity on him and fetching the milk jug from an altogether different cupboard, 'we were all a bit less dear about propriety and manners. We had to be. Life was more immediate, things tended to happen quickly.'

Carl examines the tea tray with its paraphernalia critically. 'All that's gone now, has it?'

'Not entirely. Not for people like you and me, even Mia for all she takes pains to pretend otherwise, Victor too. But others –well, Susan Baker for instance, and Cousin Sophia Crawford, Peggy Ross and that exasperating housekeeper of her mother's, Danvers –I think it's a vital part of their re-establishing of the world, the reversion to the old forms and strictures. It's not altogether a bad thing, but it does make life complicated.'

'I should say so. Hence the problem of Stir-Up Sunday.'

This last prompts Persis to raise her eyebrows in surprise.

'Rosemary's name for it,' says Carl with a shrug. 'The really vital bit, I should think, whatever we're choosing to christen it, is that sixpence goes into the pudding.'

At the Maplewood table the question of Christ the King is not so easily settled.

'It warrants red, doesn't it?' says Mia, who is sewing again. 'Like Pentecost without the fire.'

The lawn for Scilla's dress, slippery as an eel, suddenly and noiselessly eludes Mia's needle and she clicks her tongue softly at it in reproval, for all the good it does. It makes a bid to glide onto the floor, and Victor sitting close as the air at Mia's elbow, catches it before the escape can be brought off.

'Or the spirit, presumably,' says Victor, handing the fabric back.

'I'd not have said that,' says Mia mildly as she takes the fabric in hand, 'it's there in the collect, isn't it? _Stir up we beseech the o Lord this place_ … Besides, can you do that? Arbitrarily discard parts of the Trinity?'

'Other people have done before now.'

'Yes, but better people?'

'Well that –that I couldn't tell you.'

 _We have begun,_ writes Persis to Nina, _to see something more of the Wincham boy._ It is early in December, and the university deep in the throes of undergraduate collections. The evening has fallen unexpectedly spare, Mia having taken it upon herself to settle Scilla for the night. The sound of the _vilja-lied_ , pitched music-box high and twinkling, comes drifting down the stairs to Persis in the inferior armchair by the fire.

 _Do you remember?_ She resumes, as the fire crackles in the grate, _it was Wincham and his dog who indirectly introduced us to Symp_. _He used to call at the Glover house, back in the Michaelmas term, for what might be called informal tutorials with Victor Cross. It was one of the few things that could coax Mia away from her mother, the idea that there were guests to host, or so I've been told. I expect he still calls at the clergy house, but Mia evidently left enough of an impression as to result in his calling round here several evenings a week when he's out with the dog to talk things like Patristics and Church Fathers._

 _Mia keeps up with him, but Carl and I don't at all, so much so that Carl has taken to filling the time by entertaining the Lucy-dog. Her proper name, he's discovered is Ruth, as she goes wherever Wincham goes. They relish each other's company and the Wincham boy doesn't seem to mind, and the more time they spend together the more I strengthen a suspicion that all those hours of fetch and wrestling are part of an effort on Carl's part to acclimatise to the idea of attaching himself to a dog that isn't his Lucy._

 _We've still had no word as to when to expect the retired messenger dog, and I wish they'd tell us something as Carl is evidently dreading it. He hasn't said anything about it, there's only a sudden darkening of his eyes sometimes. It's a fleeting thing, like a minnow skimming across a river, but it always stays long enough to convince me that that at least isn't another ghost. I'd wonder why he'd ever agreed in the first place, except that I've sometimes thought that letting Lucy go without a goodbye was a harder loss even than his eye. She was the centre of his world for years, a north to fix on and walk towards while civilizations crumbled around him. I can't help thinking, however superstitiously, that if he could reconcile this dog that's to come to us to peacetime, he might settle whatever debt he thinks is outstanding to Lucy. It wouldn't be easy, I hope I have sense to know that, but whatever else it might be, it can only be a good thing._


	23. Chapter 23

_A Happy Canada Day from a Canadian in Scotland. I hope those for whom it's an occasion have the weather to observe the day accordingly, and with thanks always for reading!_

* * *

Nina in the time remaining before _Eugene Onegin_ is due to start, is sitting reading over a letter from Oxford, which is how she misses the sound of the door opening or indeed, anyone coming into the room. There are almost certainly more productive ways to spend the time running out before the performance, but her voice is warm still from the afternoon's run and Persis was not wrong; this is a part she could sleepwalk her way through with some skill; she laid the foundations of her career in Tatyana, singing of her and her letters is not unlike coming home.

Mia, Persis writes, is over the worst of the shock of her mother's death. Only, thinks Nina, sparing a thought for her aunt's house in Toronto, it doesn't work like that and Persis knows it. Loss, however it comes, is tenacious. She shakes her head to clear it and reads on. Scilla has grown, and her babbling is beginning to develop more of a shape. Buried deep in this newsy epistle is the offer of an invitation to Christmas, _unless you're going back to Toronto for the holiday_.

Nina is not, though the offer is there, both from Ken and Leslie, if she wishes it. But the prospect of a return to Toronto, of the house at the corner of Sussex and Huron, the inevitable rediscovery of ornaments gaudy and well-beloved of her aunt, the concession to her memory in the boiling of fruit, the gingerbread, biscuits in rye and cheese and the myriad ways of preparing fish –because they had never been a family to set a stricture on it –is a daunting one. Some year, Nina thinks abstractedly, she will resurrect these traditions wholecloth, if only to hand them on to Scilla. This year though the prospect of an Oxford Christmas, unlooked for and with all the warmth and lightness of a Hudson Bay blanket is too inviting to turn away from. It will be good to see Carl and Persis again, talk music with Fr. Cameron, perhaps be useful to Mia, and lavish attention on Scilla. She has not seen her since the summer –it has not been possible –and Nina strongly suspects the pictures sent from Silver Moon of being an imperfect representation.

She is brought out of any meaningful meditations occasioned by Persis's missive by the lifting of her hair –left to fall loose down her back –and the slightest brush of a kiss against the back of her neck.

'Someone's idea of Tatyana's impulsiveness?' asks a voice behind her, letting her hair fall again.

'Stuart,' says Nina, looking up sharply from the letter, catching his face in the reflection of the mirror and whirling to face him. 'What on earth are you doing?'

Infuriatingly he dodges the question, turning his own back on her.

'Who were you expecting?' he grins at her, the whites of his teeth glistening in the glow of the lamplight.

'No one. Not you.' She picks up a long three-cornered shawl, light brown with a border of gold and swirling leaves, and wraps it around her shoulders, then lifts her hair free from under it.

'Clearly,' says Stuart, his teeth still gleaming. He seizes upon an unoccupied chair and settles himself there.

'Well,' he demands as he rocks the chair backward, lifting the front legs up off of the floor and leaning against the wall, his arms crossed, eyes still laughing, 'was I right?'

'About –oh Tatyana. Yes, it was something like that. Not at all my idea you'll gather.'

Stuart appears to weigh the veracity of this answer.

'You agree though,' he says at last, 'or you'd not have done it.'

'Hardly,' says Nina.

'Oh I don't mean as a general rule,' says Stuart, bringing the front legs of the chair back into contact with the floor with a thud. 'I mean there are parts, the one's you've made yours, the Marschallin, Rusalka, Tatyana,' he counts them off on his fingers as he goes, 'the Countess too, I suppose, who you'd only sing if you could play the part properly.'

Nina begins to straighten the surface of the dresser she has been seated at, folding away the Oxford letter, aligning combs and brushes. At length she runs out of tasks to occupy her, so that her long fingers settle by tapping out the sobbing lamentation that is Tatyana's leitmotif against the edge of the vanity.

'Not because I've made them mine,' she says thoughtfully. 'Music doesn't work that way. There are characters though that reflect parts of yourself back at you. Those are mine.' She comes abruptly back to the present and says to Stuart Ross, 'you never did tell me what you were doing here.'

Stuart's eyes dance and Nina almost swears she can see him sifting through plausible answers. He opens his mouth, about to offer her the most likely of these, but she holds up her hand, stopping him.

'Don't tell me,' she says, 'you've found some good reason to catch this performance too.'

Stuart shrugs. 'I was going to say I'd come to hear you. But something like that's true too, I suppose.

Nina feels a sudden rush of relief she has chosen not to press the question of what it was he thought he was doing, coming in the way he had, or what he had thought to accomplish by it. She would never have had a straight answer and the thought of trying to extract one from him is exhausting. Some of that tiredness must show in her face because Stuart beams at her, equal parts earnest and theatrical.

'Don't worry,' he says brightly, 'it didn't take much work. Term's almost out, and I had the time to spare, and anyway, you've hardly fallen out of favour with the conservatory.'

'I should hope not,' says Nina, ' _you_ seem to have kept in their good graces and I never gave them half the headaches you have.'

'I've been good,' protests Stuart, 'honest. The point is, they will keep holding you up as an example –they can't exactly fault me tearing off to come listen and make a study of you.'

Nina laughs, but can make no further answer because there is a rap at the door and then unlooked for Andrew is leaning against the doorframe, dark and striking and peculiarly well suited to the part of Onegin.

His appearance catches her by surprise as much as it does Stuart, though Nina trusts she is less discernibly taken aback. Stuart's eyes round into wide Os as he looks at the other man and Nina casts her mind backwards, trying and failing to recollect if they have ever met before, or if it is only that Stuart has heard him sing – that would have been at _Rusalka_ , she thinks, or _Salome_ more lately.

'Is this a summons?' asks Nina, rising to playfulness when the surprise of seeing him has subsided.

Andrew, still hovering in the doorway arches both eyebrows and his mouth quirks as he asks, 'would you accept it if it were?'

'There are sopranos who have made careers of dramatising life as well as their music. I hope I'm not one of them.'

'Never that,' Andrew says warmly. He looks critically at her, taking in the spectacle of the clean line of the white muslin and the seemingly careless fall of the shawl.

'Countrified elegance suits you, Tanya,' he says at last.

'As the part of the gallant does you.'

She is acutely aware of Stuart's eyes on the back of her neck, of the hawk-like attention he is giving to this unexpected performance. His eyes are still wide in open, fascinated question, _is that how it's done then,_ writ large on his face, mixed with something Nina cannot and doesn't wish to place. She recognises though that he has never before seen more than hints of the mixture of teasing and archness Andrew draws so effortlessly from her; she has never let Stuart know it. It would only lead him to think she was tractable and that hope would do him far more harm, Nina thinks, than anything else she could possibly do. Deftly, she runs a hand across the vanity for something to fasten the corners of her shawl. Her hand lights on and passes over her aunt's old cluster of forget-me-nots in fretwork and enamel; there are enough ghosts in this run of _Eugene Onegin_ without her invoking yet another; the most persistent and hopeful of these looming in the doorway. She finds what she has been searching for and moves towards the door, one hand extended in greeting. The other is negotiating the clasp of a lattice-woven brooch of intricate design.

Andrew takes the hand offered, kisses her fingers and says, 'what, no gloves?'

'Countrified elegance,' says Nina as she retracts her hand, 'you're forgetting.'

'Of course –and you'd know all about that, Tanya. Middlesex isn't it, Caradoc?'

Nina inclines her head. 'I'd forgotten it had ever come up.'

'Years ago,' says Andrew with a wave of a gloved hand, 'the conservatory's _Rusalka_ , not the one that came afterwards. You learn a lot,' he says, apparently to Stuart, 'singing opposite a person. I suppose you're finding that out yourself.'

'Mm,' says Stuart vaguely. Nina turns to him and is relieved to find his glass face betraying only the shape of his evident confusion over Andrew's improbable appellation for her.

'From Tatyana,' she says to Stuart. 'It's what she's called by the nurse, never by Onegin, that I can think of.'

This last is said over her shoulder to Andrew, more than a little teasing.

'It's so much nonsense really.'

'I see,' says Stuart, who does not see at all, to judge from his eyes, still great orbs of curiosity. They darken suddenly, confusion giving way to what is far from indifferent interest as he strives to unravel the history encoded in the familiarity of the gesture. Too clever by half and never a very convincing liar it has evidently it occurred to Stuart to wonder if she has been Salome and Rusalka to Andrew too in previous performance runs. There is nothing satisfactory Nina can say to reassure Stuart on this point, not in the way he so markedly wants her to, and she does not elaborate. For all her old accusations of puckishness though, Stuart doesn't ask outright. Whether it's nerves or reasonableness Nina is not interested; she is only grateful to him for allowing her to keep that promise to Persis not to crush him.

'I thought you'd always been in Toronto, Nina,' all he says. It speaks to the depth of how little he knows her like this, flickering as a flame and vacillating as a moon.

'Goodness no,' says Nina, faintly surprised, 'I only had four years at Branksome; I thought you knew. Your sister will remember how provincial I was in those early days at French house. It was Strathroy before that, all ice-skating on lakes, making jam and Chapel on Sundays. It wasn't so many miles as the crow flies from the sort of place your father would take Robert and the dogs to go hunting.'

All of this is true, not least her implicit belief that Stuart _had_ known. Certainly he has acquired and held onto less significant details of her history.

Stuart pulls a face comedic in its perplexity. 'What, with the dogs yapping at your heels, towering cedars and scrub like moulting carpet, and the Canadian Shield looming like a sleeping giant?'

'It _is_ a sleeping giant in some spots -have you never seen it?' Then relenting, and in answer to Stuart's question, 'something like that, certainly.'

'I can't picture that at all,' he says at last.

'No,' agrees Andrew, still leaning against the doorframe, 'it doesn't quite take, does it, Nina and obscurity side by side.'

Somewhere remotely a bell sounds; this is, if Andrew's appearance was not, very definitely a summons.

'Wish me luck,' he says to Stuart, 'I've got to break her heart this evening.'

'You've got to win it first,' says Nina, laughter tingeing the edges of her voice.

'Don't remind me. It's as well you're the better actress, Tanya –I'm sure that's impossible.'

'I shouldn't like to say,' says Nina, still with the ripple of humour behind her words, 'I don't believe it's ever been tried.'

'No,' says Andrew patiently, 'you never let anyone near enough to try.'

'Whatever gives you that idea?' She means this inconsequentially, as nothing more than a kind of mild devilry and Andrew has the sense to take it as such, because he doesn't trouble to give her a proper answer.

'Give me a hint, anyway, Tanya,' he says, 'just so I have a hope of being convincing. _You_ might make an audience believe you with a look but we're not all so lucky.'

Nina considers, hums a little, and then sings, with only a trace of the coyness that no doubt has exasperated any number of tenors before now,

 _O what is rounder than a ring, what's higher than a tree?_

 _What is worse than a woman's tongue, what's deeper than the sea?_

 _What tree buds first and what bird sings best, now answer my questions all,_

 _Before I lay one night with you at either stock or wall_.

She tilts her head expectantly, inviting either of them to take over. There is a pause in which it dawns on her that whatever else she taught Stuart to sing, she has not taught him this. To begin with, her aunt had hated the song, considering it forward. Possibly it was; Nina had never given it much thought because usually it was Ken who provoked her to singing it, sparring with her with a cordial and light insincerity that she had equalled unthinkingly. Stuart though…perhaps it was the war, or her aunt's distaste for it, but if she had been asked now what had made her refrain from teaching _Captain Woodstock's Courtship_ to him, she thinks it might have been a last ineffectual effort at preserving that innocence that had been so winsome, an insurance that for a little longer Stuart Ross of South Drive need not put away childish things.

Andrew though recognises the music, he must because his mouth twitches with the suppressed rejoinder.

'I don't believe that,' he says, 'it's never so easy as that, not with you.'

 _The earth is rounder than a ring, heaven's higher than a tree_ , he sings with his own measure of devilry,

 _The Devil is worse than a woman's tongue; Hell's deeper than the sea,_

 _The oak buds first and the thrush sings best, and I've answered your questions all;_

 _So shake you out that old straw bed you'll lie next to the wall._

Nina inclines her head in mute acknowledgement of this piece of cleverness, folds her arms across her chest and parries him deftly with another verse.

 _For my breakfast you must bring me chickens without bone,_

 _For my dinner you must bring me cherries without stones,_

 _For my supper you must bring me a bird without a gall,_

 _Before I'll lay one night with you at either stock or wall_.

'There,' says Andrew, 'I _told_ you it wouldn't be so easy as that.'

He says it carelessly but there is enough sincerity behind the words that for a terrifying moment he slips in his part of the performance they are enacting, latent feeling flashing to life in the corners of his eyes. Stuart sees it and looks startled. So is Nina; understanding darts across her face like a shadow and she retreats half a pace towards the vanity, overcome with a rush of homesickness not for Toronto, or even Strathroy, but for her French House days at 10 Elm Ave, and the novelty that had been Ken's unconcerned, affectionate indifference and Persis's spirit and gift for laughing at life. For a moment she coils inward like a wary cat, the look she gives Andrew in warning sharp and quick as lightning. _Don't you dare_ , says the flash of her eyes, _I will not argue with you now, not with an audience_. A moment later she has reverted to the comfortable familiarity of long-standing acquaintance, and years of shared performances, waiting with neatly veiled disquiet for his glib rejoinder.

 _Well when the chicken is in the egg, I'm sure it has no bone,_

 _A cherry when it's in blossom, I'm sure it has no stone,_

 _The dove it is a gentle bird that flies without a gall_ …

He gives up, laughing. 'Do be serious, Nina, can't you? You never mean all of that.'

Nina's answer, which is resolutely not given in English, evidently eludes Andrew as the musical riddle has not because he looks to Stuart for interpretation. Stuart, with less Russian even than the tenor opposite him, shakes his head, eyes pellucid and face dimpled with amusement.

'She never taught me _that,_ ' he says. 'Only music.'

'I did wonder,' says Andrew with quiet satisfaction. 'Well there are worse beginnings. Nina's good at what she does. Much better than the rest of us.'

'Come on,' says Nina, deigning to translate for them. She slips her arm through Andrew's waiting one and rises with the fleetness and precision of a dancer to drop a kiss on his cheek. ' _In bocca al lupo_ ,' she says lightly, 'for luck you know,' as if to alleviate any doubt that might affix itself to the attention.

Then, over her shoulder and still with light unconcern Nina says to Stuart, 'you'll be trapped back here if you don't bolt now.'

'I wouldn't mind.'

'I know you wouldn't. I'm minding for you, and for whoever gave you the allowance to get you to England in the first place. Also for whomever it is who is now endeavouring to make you remotely biddable as a singer. Go on.'

'Oh all right,' says Stuart reluctantly, rising to go. 'Shall I wait for you afterwards?'

His face, clear as spring water, has the buffeted look of a boat in a storm. He is evidently trying for his usual carelessness; he manages instead an eager hopefulness that reminds her of little Stuart Ross looking towards the day when he could join Ken and Carl and his brother Robert at war, intermingled with uncharacteristic hesitancy. He is so reminiscent of the boy who came to her for his first singing lesson that she would give anything to revert now the old safety of teacher and would-be sister. She is not sure how or when Stuart's perception of her altered, only that she devoutly wishes it hadn't.

'Yes, do,' says Nina gently with a gesture in the direction of the desk and the letter that has earlier held her attention, 'I can tell you the news from Oxford and about Scilla. You can tell me where I've gone wrong.'

'Can't I listen for the sake of an agreeable evening?' he asks with renewed impishness.

'Not if you've promised the conservatory you'll listen critically. Anyway, learning the habit won't kill you.'

'It isn't that,' say Stuart roguishly, 'but you never make it easy, do you? You sing like an angel, you always do, and you know it.'

' _After,'_ says Nina firmly. 'You'll have to fight as it is to get to your place.'

'Oh all right,' says Stuart more grudgingly than he would seem to mean; when Nina looks over her shoulder it is to see him tearing off like a hare through the wings, eyes bright in anticipation of a treat. For a moment she stops to worry over him, but then the orchestra is heard to take the A and there is no time left for thinking.


	24. Chapter 24

_With thanks to all of you who have been reading and reviewing._

* * *

Scilla's first Christmas Nina makes the journey from London to stay with Carl and Persis, arriving late Christmas Eve after an afternoon spent singing Tatyana. They meet her at the station, and for a wonder they spot her before she sees them, picking the gold of her hair and the cut of her hat out of the crowd.

'Nina,' Carl calls from where they are waiting, mired among London-bound travellers making a late journey out to city relatives. Persis raises a hand in greeting and Scilla begins to fuss, disconcerted by the noise and the crowd, and it is this that finally helps Nina to find them.

'Poor Scilla-flower,' she says with a kiss for Scilla's golden head, 'so much commotion. It can't be nice for you. Shall we go home?'

They begin to weave their way through the crowd; it thins at Magdalene Bridge and from there becomes easier to walk.

'It's a treat to find you waiting,' says Nina as she slips Persis's arm through hers.

'It's Christmas,' says Persis, 'of course I wanted to come fetch you, and anyway, Mia insisted. She's promised to prepare tea for us.'

'Your dragons or Royal Albert's old country rose?'

'The Royal Albert's still locked in the Glover house, isn't it?' asks Carl, turning back to look at Persis as he puts the question to her.

'Yes. Mia's not been back for anything from it.'

Nina grimaces in sympathy. 'I don't blame her. It's not for nothing I'm here more than I'm in Toronto. The house is still full of things that don't –and won't ever I expect –feel like mine. It makes for a lot of ghosts.'

They are greeted first by Symp, who trots out to meet them and cause maximum disruption by threading his way through the ankles of his people, and then by Mia, who has evidently been watching for them from the kitchen window. She comes running out to meet them, hunter Stewart shawl billowing in the wind against the efforts of the cameo that fastens it.

'How was the journey?' she wants to know, 'the weather didn't hold you up, did it? We worried it would. The station must have been a nightmare this time of year –was the train very crowded?'

'Paddington was worst,' says Nina as they step into the house and out of the cold. 'How are you?' This inquiry is directed mostly at Mia's back as she retreats into the kitchen for the waiting tea tray.

'I'm all right,' she says, reappearing with the cast-iron teapot and its dragon enamelled tea bowls. She begins to lay them out on the table, catches Nina's eye and says to reassure her, 'really. Persis and Carl have been good to me. Incredibly so.'

Nina accepts this answer as given, and says as they congregate around the maple wood table, 'how's Stuart, do you know?'

'I was going to ask you,' says Persis, 'you've seen him more lately than we have.'

She tries and fails to wrest the teapot from Mia, and resigns herself to accepting a tea bowl from her instead.

'He didn't ring then?' asks Nina, surprised.

'Should he have done?'

'I wondered if he might.'

'Why, what's happened? '

'Nothing seemingly,' says Nina, 'I thought you might have had dramatics from him to contend with, that's all.'

'You've still not said why,' Persis says reasonably.

'Three guesses,' says Nina, 'it's Stuart, isn't it? He appeared from nowhere, Stuart-like, one evening and was confronted with the realisation that he isn't the only person to take a notion to visit me ahead of a performance. He was so uncharacteristically quiet about it afterwards that I wondered how much he'd minded.'

Persis shakes her head. 'All we had was his exhortation –in letter no less –that we come here you sing. He was clearly fishing for gossip I didn't have, that much was obvious, but you've just explained why. Though being Stuart I should have said _you'd_ have had theatrics to put up with, not us,' she says, equal parts amused and sympathetic.

'No,' Nina says, 'whatever he's guilty of on my account, high drama doesn't make that list. He's sweet as a rule, if impossible.'

The matter of Stuart settled they fall comfortably into an exchange of news; there is still no word of when to expect the messenger dog Carl has agreed to take on, though he thinks it will be some time in the summer, and there are whispers of Fr. Martin of Mary Magdalene church retiring. It is only what they always do, this quietly observed ritual of tea in recognition of Nina's visiting. It makes a change from the rush of London, or so she assures them as the cast-iron tea bowls clink in conspiracy against the Edinburgh glass coasters. It is only later, the day dying and the world hushed that they acknowledge Christmas Eve, going in a body to the late-night service. It is flooded with candlelight, the stones awash in the yellowy flicker of the flames, the air heavy with the smell of incense. The Gospel is sung and for a novelty the sermon strives neither for relevance nor for overwrought analogy, and they come away in the first hours of Christmas Day acutely aware of the world coming into hushed wakefulness around them.

They go round to Fr. Cameron to see in the New Year. Improbably it is the first time Persis and Carl have seen his home but Mia evidently remembers it –the clusters of overstuffed armchairs, the braid rug, the frayed weave of a footstool and the great ungainly grandfather clock –from an earlier life. She navigates them without thinking and curls up snugly against the corner of a much-abused armchair that to judge from the way Fr. Cameron's mouth broadens into a smile when he sees her, is evidently an old friend.

'I might have guessed,' he says as he hands her a mug. He has got it the wrong way round so that Mia has to scrabble awkwardly to turn it.

'I am sorry,' says Fr. Cameron with sincerity as he watches her trying not to scald her palms, 'I'm all turned about this evening. It was never you that took a mug left-handed, was it?'

'No,' says Mia, 'that was Rev. Cross's habit, not mine. I'd almost learned it by the time he left.'

'Of course, says Fr. Cameron, 'of course. Always is that way too.' He begins to hand mugs round to the others and says cautiously over his shoulder, 'that's reminded me –he said he might call in later. You don't mind?'

'Ought I to? It's your house,' says Mia, resting her chin on the lip of the mug she is clasping, 'of course you must collect your people about you. You always have done.'

'Yes, well,' says Fr. Cameron, 'that's as may be. I only meant that you don't seem to have seen much of each other.'

'Less than before, perhaps,' says Mia, 'but there have been things that I –that needed doing –on both sides, I expect.'

'Well if that's all it is,' says Fr. Cameron, 'I'll not interfere.' He sits down in what looks from the wear and weathering of it, to be his chair of choice. He folds his hands under his chin and says with immaculate evenness, 'but my memory, Mia, tells me that you can make work from nothing when you choose to –as now?'

Gracefully he turns the end of this thought into a question.

From the depth and safety of her chair Mia says, 'I'll have to think about things if I stop. They all matter, and they'll all hurt, and as long as I'm not thinking about them, none of them is real.'

'Ah, yes, I quite see that,' says Fr. Cameron with a meditative stir of his tea. 'This will be about your mother and the house?'

'Among other things.'

This unexpected burst of candour from Mia is abruptly curtailed by the chink of the front door as it comes open. It is followed in short order by the sound of Victor inquiring tentatively from the door, 'may I come in?'

Fr. Cameron ventures sufficiently into the hall as to wave him in to join the others before vanishing into the kitchen to prepare a mug of tea for the curate.

'Your ears will be burning, I suppose,' he says mildly as he goes.

'Why? What have you been saying about me?' asks Victor. He stands awkwardly in the doorway the question directed at Fr. Cameron's back while he makes tea up over the fire, aided by a whistling kettle.

'Nothing that signifies,' says Mia gently from the shelter of her chair, 'Fr. Cameron's been reconstructing preferences for tea. It's my fault; I've not visited here in a long time.'

'Not since you came back from St. Hilda's, in fact,' says Fr. Cameron, managing to hand Victor Cross his mug right-handed. Victor accepts it and duly twists it round until the handle is braced securely against his left hand.

'I'd have got it right you know,' says Fr. Cameron with assumed reproach to Mia, 'if you hadn't put it back into my head about how _you_ took a cup of tea. You'll have to forgive the inelegance of it,' this to Victor with a gesture at the thickness of the mug in that man's hands, 'as I haven't anything to hold a candle to the Royal Albert, never have.'

'I shouldn't worry,' says Victor easily, 'neither have the people at the clergy house.'

Fr. Cameron's eyes sparkle, gratified. 'Mind you,' he says, 'these can't even match your college china, Mia.'

'They're yours though,' she says, 'and they suit you; they always have.'

'Well perhaps there's something in that,' says Fr. Cameron. 'They've survived years with me –and all you students calling round,' he adds, his eyes creasing with laughter and memory.

He turns to Victor and balances his elbows on his knees with great precision, his eyes gleaming like green coals in the firelight.

'Tell me,' he says, 'am I right thinking the vestry mean you to take over from Fr. Martin when he goes?'

'I shouldn't have thought so,' Victor says, battling against the low back of the sofa where it presses into his spine, 'they've not said to me if they do.'

Fr. Cameron nods with the air of some grave ariel. 'Remiss of them,' he says, 'most remiss. When exactly is it he's thinking of going?'

'Epiphany. At least, that's when the notice is going into the church bulletin, so perhaps it will be sometime after that. I'd have thought they'd want _you_ to take over,' says Victor to Fr. Cameron. He is has sunk low into the sofa in an ineffectual effort to escape the uncomfortable lowness of its back. Fr. Cameron raises two eyebrows in alarm.

'Has anyone said so?'

'You'd understand what to do though,' says Mia simultaneously as Victor says, 'no, but I should have thought you had much the best idea of how to run the place.'

'Not at all,' says Fr. Cameron, 'but that isn't the point. Isn't the point at all. I could only be temporary, you know, and that wouldn't do any good. Far better they petition the bishop to keep you on and save them sifting through so many applications from outside. You know at least as much about that church as I do, when it comes to details. More I shouldn't wonder.'

Victor looks so startled by this suggestion that Fr. Cameron stops and blinks at him in bemusement.

'You look quite taken aback at the idea,' he says. 'Would it really be so awful to have the run of the place?'

'No,' says Victor, 'it isn't that at all. On the contrary, it may have made one or two things possible.' He gives up the battle with the sofa, and crosses the room to settle more comfortably against the side of Mia's chair.

From the carpeted comfort of the floor he succeeds at turning the conversation away from himself. 'Where in Argyll and the Isles were you, Fr Cameron? I've often wondered.'

Never one needing encouragement to talk, Fr, Cameron begins to reminisce and for a time conversation subsides in favour of story. At this Fr. Cameron excels and he spins any number of anecdotes about his former parish. As the fire dies down to its embers though he breaks off his history of Argyle and the Isles and turning to Nina says, 'I wonder –there's a song the Marschallin sings in the first act about time and growing old. I wonder if you'd sing it? It feels right for this evening.'

Nina has never needed convincing to sing; applied to with such warmth and keenness she yields at once.

' _Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding_ ,' she says, placing the music at once. 'Of course.'

It is not easy music, but listening to Nina she makes it sound effortless. Even so there is a weight and gravity to the words that has its roots in some unutterable and archaic wisdom that cannot, need not be verbalised. The overwhelming veracity of it is stamped on Nina's face, visible even in the firelight, and there too is the knowledge not that she has taken any of this woman into herself, but that she has brought herself into the Marschallin and is colouring those deeply resonate phrases with her own raw and bleeding experience.

 _Manchmal steh' ich auf mitten in der Nacht und lass die Uhren alle, alle stehn_ she sings and in the hallway the grandfather clock strikes the hour, the last of the old year, portentous in its chiming. Low and sonorous as it is, they nonetheless flinch, partly from the intrusion, partly from the hollowness left behind where the music has been. For a moment as the last of the music and the gonging of the clock ebb away there is just visible at the corners of Nina's eye the look that has always made her Marscahllin so devastatingly credible; the suggestion that she would in some hour of quiet desperation, bring the clock to a standstill for all the good it would do. It passes unnoticed though, obscured by the firelight and the lingering thrall of the music. By the time normalcy begins to return for the others it has gone, and there is only Nina, refined and collected as the time draws on for witching-hour.

Not understanding the chill that has overwhelmed her, and not daring to speak, Mia turns to Victor Cross, her eyes anxious for some answer that will make sense of the ache of the absent music. Softly, so as not to shatter the calm that has come of the music, he looks up at her and translates, ' _Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and stop all the clocks –all of them_.'

It is a phrase Mia knows, has heard Fr. Cameron quote often over the years, but she has never heard it in context like this, never with the full authority of the music behind it. There seems after this nothing meaningful to say, and they sit in contemplative and companionable silence. At length the clock recalls them again, striking 12 this time and they venture out to the front of the house to see in 1927. One of the churches is welcoming in the year by the ringing of the changes, Kent Treble Bob Major, the full peal easily discernable over the bluster of the winter wind, which is singing its own welcome. It is out with a vengeance, and it whips colour into their faces and rouses Scilla from a seemingly dreamless sleep. She stretches in Persis's arms and reaches with her hands as if trying to envelop the onward-rushing New Year and the cold, and the bluster.

'There's one of our flying terms all banded in gold going by,' says Mia, covering Scilla's hand with one of hers against the chill, 'Make a wish as it goes past, Scilla-flower, for you can't call them back once they've flown.'

They do not stay long after that but say their goodnights and vainly attempt to thank Fr. Cameron for the evening. He brushes their thanks away with a hand.

'Not at all,' he says, 'not at all. I've enjoyed myself enormously. Haven't had so much company, and all so agreeable, in a long while. Really, all told I've done very little. Sat and listened to you lot chatter, and quite satisfying it was too.'

Looks are exchanged among the others, good-natured and unbelieving but they know better than to contradict him, even Nina who is only an occasional member of this circle.

Then Persis, Mia and Nina step out into the night, the air clear and pregnant with the sensation of being awake when the world is asleep. They are bent close in conversation as they wend their way down what little walk there is leading to Fr. Cameron's house and fail to realise they have got ahead of the others. Scilla's attention is for the stars, scintillating against the velveteen blackness of the sky, and their attention is all for her.

Carl hovers at the window watching them and bundling his scarf into his coat. Shrouded against the cold the women look more than ever like three benevolent spirits whisking Scilla away to the land of Fairy. He'd feel uneasy about it if it weren't for the bright and wholesome sound of their laughter weaving it's way back to him and reaching through the glazing of the window. Over the sound of it he just catches Nina's antiquated well-wish and Persis's English reiteration for Scilla's benefit. When Victor join him, Carl senses him more than he sees him –Victor is standing on his bad side and moving with the soundless gracefulness distinctive to priests and cats.

'They look well, don't they?'

'Oh yes,' says Carl, 'moonlight suits Persis. It always has.'

He begins to hum without realising that he does it the old song, _silvery moon in the great dark sky_ …

'What's that from then?' asks Victor, perforce pulling Carl back into the present.

'A sort of fairytale. I gather it ends badly. I was rather luckier.'

'How do you mean?'

'Oh well,' says Carl, shrugging the memory aside, 'I came back –that's part of it. And she was still waiting, you know. I shall always remember that –standing outside the Sussex Avenue house, seeing the skeletons of the yew trees in the November evening and realising suddenly that I had come without the least idea of what I meant to say or do now that I was there, and that even if I had…'another shrug. 'I don't know. I suppose for a minute I allowed myself to believe I had no idea how I'd be received. Then a candle flared to life in the window –it was an old vow that, you understand, one I only hoped she had kept –and that was enough.'

'Candles and music, hm?'

'And cups of tea,' says Carl, 'those cast-iron tea bowls, you know, and glimpses of histories –ours not the world's. It might as easily have been ghosts and poppies for pressing and early English poetry.'

'Nothing was ever said,' says Victor uneasily.

'Love doesn't need to be,' says Carl, 'it's not that sort of feeling. I mean it _can_ be, there are words for it, but the feeling of it, the depth; it cleaves to the very fibres of your being. There aren't words for that, or at least they're insufficient ones, and then you know, then the acknowledgement, the recognition of it is enough.'

Victor does not answer; he drums his fingers meditatively against the windowsill.

' _Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it_. Is that what you mean?'

'I think you know.'

Victor's fingers are still playing across the windowsill. Impulsively, and without looking at him, Carl says, 'you mustn't break her heart, Victor. We'd forgive you many things, and you must know it –but not that.'

'No,' says Victor. He picks up and begins to fuss with a curtain tie. 'I know,' he says. 'I've no intention of doing anything of the sort.'

'Good,' says Fr. Cameron comfortably behind them, making both men start. 'That's good.' He smiles at Carl. 'I owe you a debt,' he says genially, 'you've saved me the bother of being severe. I _can_ be, but I don't specially like it. Go on,' he says, nodding benevolently and raising a hand to the little group at the foot of the garden walk, 'you mustn't keep them waiting. We can't have Scilla catching a chill.'

'Scilla's in no such danger,' says Carl with comfortable unconcern. 'They'd never let anything like that happen to her.'

Even so, he and Victor come away from the window. They have got as far as the front door when Fr. Cameron snares Victor's arm gently in one of his gnarled hands.

'I know you're wary of our hens clucking,' he says, eyes warm in the light of the gas lamps, smoking softly like chimneys around the room.

'Well,' says Victor haltingly, 'I wasn't sure whether–I mean I didn't want to cause any awkwardness for her, that's all.'

'I know,' says Fr. Cameron, pressing the arm of his curate. 'It made me think though, none of them can possibly comment if you were to happen to call on me at the same sort of time. It would look –well, it would look harmless enough. I really _did_ used to collect people here for tea, once. Ask Mia, she'll remember.' He releases Victor's arm and says disarmingly, 'it's only an idea, mind. You needn't do anything with it if you'd rather not.'

'No,' says Victor, 'it's a good thought. Thank you,' and he and Carl step out into the night.


	25. Chapter 25

_We have finally had word_ , writes Persis to Nina one grey afternoon in February, _to expect the retired messenger dog in the autumn. The report Carl's had says she would have arrived earlier, only they have had all the usual trouble with quarantine. Coincidences being what they are, she is coming to us from Canada. Kitchener I think, though don't take my word for it. It may well be somewhere more in keeping with your Strathroy._

 _You'd better hope it's Kitchener after all_ , comes Nina's answer, written by candlelight on the window seat of her London home in the aftermath of a performance. _I am reliably assured nothing comes out of Strathroy except expectations of grandeur and a wish to have the earth laid at one's feet._

Persis pauses long enough in her reading to wonder whether it was Stuart or someone more fluent with Nina's character that had the nerve to make this assertion about her first home. Curiosity gives way to amusement though as she reads on.

 _Having met Symp though, and knowing what Carl is like with animals, I'm confident both those expectations will be met as a matter of course. In any event, my love to her when she does arrive, if I can't manage a visit, which looks increasingly likely. This year is a full one –there are costs to grandeur and having the earth handed to you._

She has enclosed, in light of this, a precipitate birthday gift for Scilla, _while I think of it_ , the justification she offers, and an apology should she not be able to get away in April. _Tell Scilla,_ she says, _that I am, as ever, thinking of her, and that I trust Mia will more than make up for my having been held up at Covent Garden_.

In the event, Nina does manage an afternoon away, though her faith in the others to make a suitable occasion of it is far from unjustified and Scilla's first birthday passes with all the ceremony believed befitting of the occasion by her devoted retainers. Fr. Cameron showers her with unlikely and improbable –though beautiful –gifts, Mia seizes upon the excuse to bake, and Victor finds the first of the Scilla-flowers nestled in some corner of the Blenheim Wood and brings them to the house bound in blue ribbon, where they are set in state on the maple wood table.

It is shortly after this that Mia says one morning towards the end of April, 'I ought to do something about that garden' as she looks towards what had been her mother's house. She has twisted round on the sofa so that she is facing towards the window, her arms pillowed on the sofa back. The yew hedges of Silver Moon and the garden beyond them are just visible. The lawn is beginning to grow long, with the odd dauntless yellow dandelion for colour. Along the borders the perennials Mia has planted in bygone years, the speedwell, lavender, and salvia, are gamely beginning to come into bud, looking perhaps a bit ragged round the edges.

'It's all going to go to wilderness otherwise. I'm not convinced it hasn't already.'

Carl joins her by the window and squints at the remains of the Glover garden.

'Not yet,' is his verdict. 'Still definitely a garden. I'll have a go at it if you like though.'

'No,' says Mia, 'I need to sort the house out anyway. I might as well do both at once.'

'You may as well have help with it,' says Persis. 'We'll make a day of it, shall we?'

'You mustn't,' Mia says, 'you've done more than enough for me. I ought to get the place in hand and give you back your home.'

Persis and Carl though, will not be dissuaded. There is only the prospect of line edits for an article on varieties of English dragonfly on Carl's side and letter-writing on Persis's to be contended with, and neither objects to shunting these things to one side in favour of a day at the Glover house.

It has the cool, stale smell of an unoccupied house when they arrive. The door, which was always stiff, protests more than ever after its protracted disuse and when Mia draws the curtains to bring in the light they send little eddies of dust swirling off the neglected windowsills.

For the most part, the boxing away of the possessions in the Glover house is straightforward, Mia's inclination is to salvage very little of it. The first time she stumbles it is over the unwieldy furniture.

'It would be easier,' she says to Persis as they drape protective sheets over the furniture, 'if I knew definitely where I'd be. I can't live here again –aside from anything else it would make no sense. It was too big a house even when I shared it with mother, and yet if I don't –there's nowhere else to go.'

'You know you needn't hurry away from us,' says Persis, and Mia hums appreciatively. Once she says as she wrestles with enshrouding the chaise-lounge her mother had been used to occupy, 'I had hoped…'before stopping short. It does not matter, any hopes Mia is cherishing are discernable in the sudden colouring of her face, in the cautious and quick glances she shoots out the window as if half-expecting company that won't come.

Mia stumbles the second time over an oasis of papers in what was once her father's study. She is peering at a stack of leather copybooks, their pages covered in minute and spidery handwriting when Persis joins her.

 _Hilary Term 19—_ says the topmost book when it is spread open. Underneath, gently sloping across the page is carefully transcribed,

 _A land of waters green and clear,_

 _Of willow and of poplars tall,_

 _And, in the spring-time of the year,_

 _The white may breaking over all,_

 _And Pleasure quick to come at call._

'An accurate summation?' asks Persis, reading over Mia's shoulder.

'Oh yes –I should say so,' says Mia, and laughs. Then she closes her eyes against some abstract and apparently incommunicable memory, more wistful and reverent than Persis has ever known her.

'I thought I'd go back, you know,' Mia says, her voice almost prayerful. She is speaking more to herself than for her friend's benefit.

'After the war…when mother was ill the first time…I thought she'd get over it –or not –and I'd go back. I thought –I suppose I thought a lot of things. I thought I might earn a degree that counted for something, to start with…that I could go back to that life without effort. I'd have done it too, might even have been good at it. I _know_ I'd not have minded the retreat into research and college life always –I think I even wanted it, once.' Her hands trace paths across the tightly curled handwriting, a smile coming into flower on her lips.

'And now?' asks Persis.

'Sometimes I think I'd still like it. St. Hilda's was safe, and I was at home there.'

Mia opens her eyes, surfacing abruptly from this recollection, as she does so and closing the copybook. She sets it and its fellows safely on the desk, relics of an almost obliterated dream.

'It didn't happen like that, of course. Mother never recovered enough afterwards for me to justify leaving. Even if she had, she'd forgiven me going once, but she wouldn't have done it a second time, and I wouldn't have wanted that. Her world was always such a small one –I couldn't make it smaller, even at the cost of comfort. Besides,' says Mia, with an upward glance at the copybooks, 'even if I could have done, I never expected I would fall in love.'

The third time she stumbles it is over the Royal Albert china. She opens the kitchen cupboard to it and makes a tight and strangled noise far in the back of her throat.

'What is it?' asks Persis, looking up from boxing silverware. She has to wait on an answer though because the Royal Albert has succeeded where the rest of the house has failed and reduced Mia to tears. Quietly Persis abandons her efforts with the silverware and crosses the kitchen to close the cupboard door for Mia, who is left standing silently in front of the unforgiving panelling of the kitchen cupboards. Mutely she lets Persis lead her by the elbow to the kitchen worktable, an old, scarred affair of indeterminate softwood. She is turning a piece of the Royal Albert old country rose between her fingers, a delicately crafted milk jug that Persis has failed to notice in her hands.

'It was never mine you know.'

'How do you mean?' Persis asks.

'I mean it belongs here. At St. Hilda's I had a mixture of china –oddments of patterns that competed to form a set. It was imperfect, and certainly not so grand as this but it was mine and if it comes to that I'm not so grand as mother's old country rose pattern either.' Mia looks critically at the milk jug with its fine fluted spout, a finger tracing the wishbone-thinness of the handle.

'I used to think if I ever had cause to leave home, I could rescue it. Now I can't help feeling I ought to save some of mother's china–a teacup or the sugar bowl, _something_. It's not that I want it especially, only that there isn't anyone else left to remember her. Her taste in food, the way she angled a book at the end for ease of reading, the way she said my name. That must sound remarkably silly.'

'Not at all,' says Victor Cross from the kitchen door.

Whatever Mia's plans for the salvation of the Royal Albert, the milk jug rapidly becomes a lost cause. Startled, she lets it go and it shatters against the kitchen floor, dissolving into fragments of white shot through with gold leaf and roses.

It is later, the shards of the milk jug swept away, and tea spread out on the kitchen table, the Royal Albert a beacon of order and civility among the chaos of the disassembled house, that Mia notices the blisters on Victor's hands. They flare to red and angry life as he accepts one of Mrs. Glover's teacups, irritated by the heat of the china.

'What were you doing?' asks Mia.

Sucking air in between his teeth, Victor sets the teacup down and holds his hands out for scrutiny, seemingly only just noticing the presence of the blisters.

'Well I…' but he changes his mind and instead reaches into his coat and extracts a cluster of nettles. Uncertain what to do with them he sets them on the table, where they lie like fiery and unlit tapers among the rookery of the Royal Albert.

'They're a strange offering, I know' says Victor, 'only I thought –'

'I remember.'

'I'm afraid I'm no less imperfect.'

'I hope you don't think I _am_.'

As noiselessly as she can manage, Persis withdraws from the kitchen with a mug of tea for Carl which she sets with her own on a tea tray. Carl is wrestling with the yew hedge when Persis finds him. The tray clatters gently against the stone of the steps as she sets it down and Carl abandons his effort with the hedge to say needlessly, 'I wasn't expecting you.'

'No, well, I thought I'd be less in the way here. The crackle of electricity hasn't extended this far, anyway.'

'Hm?' Carl crosses the lawn to accept the proffered mug of tea with gratitude coloured with confusion.

Persis recounts the story of Victor's arrival and Carl nods, then rubs the back of his neck meditatively. It leaves his collar askew, the corners sticking out at crooked angles.

'I thought I saw him walk past,' says Carl. 'I supposed he was headed towards whatever that parish north of here is. You know the one, Cranford or…'he gives a half-shrug at the elusiveness of the name.

'Crampton Hodnet?'

Carl nods appreciatively. 'That's the one. Not that it matters if he's presently in the kitchen having tea. What brought that about?'

'The tea? It's temporarily solved the problem of the Royal Albert, I think.'

'Problem? What's it done?' confusion recrosses Carl's face and he squints again at the ragged yew hedge. It has overgrown the fence, sprouting branches that encroach on the Glover yard and producing stalks that creep up through the lawn and fence slats, their roots enmeshed with the rest of the hedge on the Silver Moon property.

'It's what to do with it,' says Persis, elaborating and sipping at her tea.

'I see, does Mia not want the stuff then?'

'I don't know. Some things have ghosts, I think, does that make sense? There's a reason those glass teacups of Nina's aunt haven't gone with Nina to London.'

'Yes,' says Carl heavily, 'yes, that makes lots of sense. But,' he looks with sudden curiosity at Persis, 'I hadn't realised you knew.'

It is Persis's turn to shrug and peer closely at the overgrown yew hedge.

'Sussex Ave had its share,' she says. 'And Ingleside after the war was crawling with them. You must have noticed.' The sun has begun to slip towards the earth and the shadows shooting out from the yew hedge look more ungainly than ever.

'Can I help?' Persis offers after a moment, setting her mug down carefully on the tea tray.

'I think you'd better,' says Carl. 'I lost my line of symmetry somewhere in France –oh a while ago now.'

They exchange smiles and work until the thrushes startle into full-throated evensong and the air has cooled with the chill of an April evening coming to ground. Persis pauses to gather the tea tray and braces herself against reentry into the house with its heavy and carefully observed silences. She is unsure how the last three-quarters of an hour have passed for Mia and Victor and finds unexpectedly that she hasn't the nerve to ask.

She doesn't have to; Mia's face gives her away. The Royal Albert has long since been enshrouded with tissue paper, two rinsed teacups set aside _in memoriam_ on the kitchen counter. The rest is buried in cardboard, and the silverware likewise. Neither is the sort of task calculated to leave a person glowing, and Mia is. So is a flicker like an ember on Mia's hand.

'Will you tell me about it?' says Persis.

Mia cannot. 'Why,' she wants to know as she comes out of her dream, 'can't everyone be as happy as I am?'

'Because unlike you' says Persis affectionately, 'we haven't all earned the luxury.'

Mia looks away and then down at the ruby glowing warm and dark against her hands, white still from a winter indoors, and declines to answer.

'It's not nearly good enough, of course,' says Victor as he joins them, and not, if Mia's response is a augur, for the first time.

'But then nothing was ever going to be.'

Persis is inclined to agree.


	26. Chapter 26

_To all of you who guessed where the story of Nina and Stuart would find its resting place, well done. I hope I've done it and them justice. As ever, thanks for reading and reviewing -I love hearing from you._

* * *

 _Stuart has graduated_ , writes Nina in June to Persis. _Your mother went to see him as I couldn't get away and didn't trust Ken or Peggy especially to pass on anything approaching detailed information. At the risk of damning her unduly, I'm not at all sure I trust Peggy to have attended in the first place –she has form there._

 _Your mother says though that Stuart acquitted himself well. I gather from her he sang 'Ah Mes Amis' –do you remember? Hearing that I'm almost glad I was tied up with Tatyana and her letter writing. Glad is possibly the wrong word, but you of all people will understand what I mean. The handful of times I've sung Marie –sung any Donizetti really –it has only been with supreme effort I have dissociated that music from the war. I still hear it and see Stuart 'cycling up Spadina to tell us that we had won Vimy Ridge and landing every one of those Cs._

 _In true Stuart fashion he has landed on his feet. Part of it's luck but part of it too is that he really is as good as I've been telling you al these years, and someone here has had the sense to notice. You'll be able to judge for yourself if you come up to London in the autumn. He's to sing Ruggero in_ _La Rondine_ _._

 _I have the feeling he thinks I've put a word in for him but I've done him no such favour and never would –he's more than capable of earning his own stripes and he ought to know it by now. If he has to contend with my Magda –and he does –it's only because I've a great affection for her, though I don't make a habit of the part. We're alike, she and I; if I sang her too often someone would see the likeness._

 _Besides, Stuart's been threatening for years to sing opposite me. It's about time he made good on that promise._

That is why in September, having entrusted Scilla to the ministrations of Fr. Cameron, Carl and Persis along with Victor and Mia set out to see Puccini's _La Rondine_ – _The Swallow_ , Persis renders it for the others when asked for the English. The story, she tells them when she parses it in the interval, is grappling with that ever popular and complex theme, love, its fragility, and its ability to endure. It is a story full of grandeur and swells of feeling, unlike anything they have ever known Nina to sing, and Persis's memory of Nina's musical history is long-running, deeply entwined with her own past as it is.

As Magda, Nina charms them. At once warm and playful, the sincerity of Magda's wish for true love feels almost palpable. The enthralled audience forgives her in a heartbeat the fickleness that will be Magda's undoing and Ruggero's devastation without realising that it does it.

'I thought Nina said she couldn't sing Puccini,' says Carl in the interval.

'She wouldn't usually,' says Persis. 'Her voice is lighter than the music as a rule –or so I'm told. There's a truth she can give to Magda though that makes the music real.'

There is no arguing with this. Nina renders the music like a finely spun dream. _Chi'il Bel Sogno di Doretta_ is heavenly; from the first note it is glistering and golden, ornate and intricate as starlight. That is the first remarkable thing.

The second is the ease with which Stuart as Ruggero equals her performance. There are lists drawn up by the critics in the arts columns of the papers –Persis has seen them – of the men who have before now sung opposite Nina and failed to match her capability. Most striking though is not that Stuart survives this musical litmus test, but that he seems utterly oblivious to the fact he is doing it. Perhaps it is because he can still remember standing by her aunt's piano and being taught _Sing Me A Song of a Lad that is Gone_ but in any event he is at once at home not only with Nina but the demands of the music. He shines as Ruggero, the young man with the misfortune of loving Magda, swept along by the fairy-story of her origin, trusting implicitly both in her purity and love of him. He brings to the part an unlooked for gentleness, and a well of tenderness, his voice is full of the shimmer of faith in the essential goodness of the woman he loves and the assurance of her constancy. He doesn't feel to Persis completely as if he is acting, and she finds she is holding her breath against the ending and his desertion by Magda.

When it comes, Persis thinks for a minute Nina has tempered some of that renowned coldness, and for a heartbeat she is relieved. Then the duet ripples with feeling, redolent of the sting of renounced vows and broken promises, that Nina colours with all the gentleness of a caress, the warmth of a kiss, and that is far worse. The patience of Nina's voice as it drops ever lower down the scale, the sweetness of the blow, is so unexpected that it is more painful to listen to than any amount of cold-blooded reserve. It is only in the face of Ruggero's persistence, convincing as ever in Stuart's hands, that the first edges of that sheer coldness appear in Nina. Her voice scales musical heights with terrifying severity, iciness and remoteness falling on her like a blanket against the swell of the orchestra. Persis catches herself wondering if Stuart has ever come up against this side of Nina before; rehearsals she knows are a symptom of conservatory life that do not necessarily extend into the world proper. She has learned this much from Nina's correspondence in the early years of her career. From the rawness of Stuart's response it seems unlikely. There is too much exposed feeling in his pleading with her, too much unexpected hurt for it to feel thoroughly rehearsed. Whatever he has anticipated it is not the calm dismissal that Nina as Magda gives him before she flits swallow-like back to her old, protected life of the first act. It is a wrench that is felt keenly, not only by Ruggero, the surprise of the loss etched remarkably on Stuart's face, but by the audience, who is used to finding it's heart broken in sympathy with Nina, not by her. It is with collective relief that they see her take Stuart's hand during the final curtain to receive the accolades together.

Afterwards Stuart comes and finds her to talk through the performance, curious to hear how he has acquitted himself and self-conscious about asking outright. He is not sure he could find the words even if he wanted too; he can still feel the quicksilver edge of Nina's voice like a knife. He does not have to wait long though, Nina holds out her hands to him as he comes into her dressing room and says simply, 'well sung.'

'You think so?'

'Would I say so otherwise?'

'S'pose not,' says Stuart, abashed into childish habits. He looks down at his feet, scuffing them against the carpet. More for something to distract him than anything else he picks up the programme with its quaint academic notes and flips through the pages.

'I always forget it's you,' he says, laughing suddenly at a detail that has caught his eye.

'Mm?' Nina comes and peers over his shoulder –she has to rise on tiptoe to do it –and follows the line of his eyes.

'Your name –in the programme. It never _sounds_ like you when I read what they've called you. I can't even pronounce it. Nina, when did your name become too grand for common use?'

'On the contrary,' says Nina, laughter rippling through her words like liquid gold, 'it was never good enough.'

'How d'you make that out?' Stuart sets the programme down almost reverently and pivots to face her. Nina folds her arms across her body and shakes her head, smiling at him.

'Dear boy,' she says, 'when you've succeeded as a world-renowned Canadian tenor let me know how you've done it, and by all means I'll take my cues from you. If anyone can manage it, it will be you; you'll charm them into acceptance. In the meantime though, it suits them to make much of my heritage.'

Stuart's eyebrows shoot upwards, almost vanishing under a fringe of sandy curls.

'Really?' He sounds incredulous.

'Really. They don't know what to do with Canada,' says Nina affectionately of the opera houses she has sung in.

'Not even for you?'

Nina taps the programme with an elegantly manicured finger, her name there italicised in full Slavic pronunciation. 'Not even for me.'

'I suppose I'd better settle for Toronto then,' says Stuart, and grins, showing his teeth. 'I haven't a hope of eclipsing you.'

'I don't know,' says Nina lightly, 'if anyone could…tenors are beginning to come into their own, the world's starting to acknowledge the work they do.'

Stuart shrugs, that old fluid gesture he has caught from watching her. 'Maybe,' he says, 'but not while you've got the hearts of so many at your feet. They've already forgotten how hard you can be. If I had tried that…' he shrugs, dismissing the outcome.

Nina's hand against his face is cool as she says sympathetically, 'dear boy, did it hurt very much?'

'You might have warned me,' says Stuart.

'If I had would you have sung so well as that?'

Stuart opens his mouth to object, lets out a breath and begins again. 'No. You knew it too.'

His cheeks are flushed with blood and mixed feeling, redder even than the yew berries of Sussex Ave in Nina's memory.

'That's what I mean, what I was saying; the nerve, the confidence when you sing –no one else could possibly rival you for it, and you know it, Nina. You could never afford to tell me nice things or make such a mangle of your audience otherwise. Anyway, I reckon one of us ought to be in Toronto. You know, keep an eye on Ken's nestlings. You're only a stone's throw from Scilla, Mia too. It doesn't seem fair that she should have all of our attention at once, even if she _is_ destined to be another soprano.' Stuart beams broadly and his humour is almost contagious.

'You think they'll need it, don't you?' says Nina, 'Ken's children I mean. Someone to make the rough places plain.'

'What a funny way to put it,' Stuart says, laughing outright at the unexpectedness of the remark, his eyes dancing. 'I don't know if I meant that exactly. Only –' he stops abruptly, as if flattened and Nina has to tap his shoulder to prompt him to finish.

'Only,' he says in a sudden and uncharacteristically apologetic rush, 'I was ever so glad of Persis, Ken and you. If I hadn't had you lot to pester…' he shrugs, crimsoning still further with the unexpectedness of the admission. He might be nearly grown up but he hasn't shaken his boyhood horror of acknowledging deep emotion; his brother, Nina thinks in a burst of exasperation with Robert Ross, had no doubt told him it was sissy. Once Stuart has started though, he seems unable to stop. 'You were angels to me, especially once Robert and Ken were 'way at war, and Rowena dead, and Peggy all tied up with her Red Cross work and… and mum had –well, you remember what mum was like.'

Nina does remember too; the memory of Stuart's mother bent attentively over a decanter of sherry at some preternaturally early hour of the morning is still stamped on her memory, as is the sound of Stuart's squeaky child's voice over the 'phone, _please will you come over, it's mum, she's unhappy and I don't know…_

'It's not the same of course,' says Stuart hastily, bringing Nina immediately back to the present, 'I mean it's not the same as my family –every family has its own unhappinesses and all that –but I don't like to think…'he shrugs again, as if dismissing a thought. 'I know you and Persis worry about them is all,' he says carelessly, as if it is really nothing to do with him, all this heightened talk of the little Fords.

'Do you not then?'

'Dunno. A little. I mean it would be different if you were still there, Nina, you know about things like that. What to do.'

'I didn't live it,' she says quietly.

'Well, I didn't really either. I had you and Persis and…and they haven't, I guess I mean. You're never back to stay when you're in Toronto, and Persis and Carl, well.' He shrugs. 'I only mean you were right about them not coming back from Oxford. They worship you of course, Gil and Nora – Owen will too when he's bigger –but Nina, you haven't really been there in ages, at least, not as _you_. When I was small…I remember…you were never so mannered with me, not even when you were teaching me to sing, never so staid. You were, well the way you are with Scilla. All warm and eager –impulsive too –as if you were carrying a fired taper inside you. I think…I guess I think there ought to be _someone_ , one of us, that's at ease in the city, you know? To do the swooping and catching and, what did you liken it to? That bit of _The Messiah_?'

'The rough places plain? It's scripture too, you heathen.' She taps Stuart's nose affectionately. He ignores her, unrepentant.

'Yes,' he says, 'that. One of us ought to be there to do that. Offer an escape if they have a fancy for one.'

'You're right,' says Nina quietly, 'it's your home, not mine now. You'll let me know how they get on?'

Something in the room shifts irrevocably, and Stuart sees it as much as he feels it, a look like the coruscation of a shooting star that darts across Nina's face.

' 'Course I will,' he says, snatching impulsively at Nina's hand, 'and if anything comes up that I…well if I'm noticing it will probably be something dramatic. Anyway, if anything like that should happen, I'll send for you, Persis too.'

Nina nods mute acceptance. All she and Persis had ever managed, after all, was to smooth out the roughest patches of Stuart's not uncomplicated childhood; he will know what to watch for in the little Fords of Front Street.

'And you,' says Stuart with boyish inelegance, 'you won't…' he ducks his head to cover the fresh blush creeping from the back of his neck to his face and abandons his efforts to more fully articulate the thought.

'Ken used to say I had more moods than a cat,' Nina says mildly, apparently irrelevantly, to help him along.

'Still does,' says Stuart before he can help himself. His hand flies belatedly to his mouth, more, Nina suspects, to cover the sheepish grin that is threatening than from any real wish to retract the words. When she laughs it is a warm golden sound that Stuart –least of all the Stuart who remembers her when she was at home in Toronto –cannot hold against her.

'It was Ken you spoke to then,' she says, 'not Persis, after _Onegin_.'

'Well I wanted –you weren't like _you_ then, Nina.'

'Dear boy,' she says softly, her hand going to his cheek again, 'I was though. Very much myself.' She retracts her hand, and Stuart ducks his head, chagrined.

'Ken rather thought that too,' says Stuart. 'But I'd never seen you like that before.' His confusion brings his earlier question suddenly to the fore and he asks impulsively, 'you won't settle, will you Nina?'

'The only Puccini I can carry off,' says Nina with a smile, 'Is Magda. I'm far too much like a swallow and swallows don't settle; they're always seeking the sun.' Her voice is striking in its gentleness.

'Where's the sun now?' Stuart wants to know.

'I don't know,' Nina says simply. 'Even that changes.'

Relief brightens Stuart's face. 'That's all right then,' he says. 'I mean I still…' he ducks his head again, scuffs his feet against the carpet and does not finish the thought. It doesn't matter; his face is readable as ever.

'Dear boy, as if I could talk you out of anything you set your mind to –or any feeling. I hope by now I know better than to try. But come back to earth sometimes, won't you?'

'Yes, all right,' says Stuart lightly, 'if you like. I suppose swallows are more easily caught on solid ground.' He smiles impishly, white teeth flashing and eyes sparkling with laughter. Nina shakes her head indulgently.

' I suppose no one's yet died of trying,' she says. 'Come on, there are people who've come up to hear you –shall we go find them?'


	27. Chapter 27

_To all of you who have read, favourited, followed and/or reviewed this story, thank you. I loved to write it, and it means a lot that you've taken time to read it; the writing process is never complete until a reader deigns to receive the story. It only takes one reader for that exchange to take place; that there have been more is often unbelievable to me. Thank you, always._

* * *

It is early in October, the leaves rusted and yellowed with wear as they come to ground, that Mia and Victor are married. It is a quiet affair, presided over by Fr. Cameron, his voice more lilting and musical than ever in his contentment as he reads the service. Nina travels down from London on purpose, when the news comes by way of an Oxford epistle, but otherwise there is only Carl and Persis, with small Scilla for witnesses. Excepting Scilla's gently babbled approval, the church is heavy with stillness, dust motes iridescent in the multicoloured illumination of the stained glass.

Afterwards they return to the clergy house for tea. Mia's college china is in evidence, Aviemore, Spring Violets, Dresden Rose, augmented now, Persis suspects by two teacups in the Royal Albert old country rose. The sight of it laid out unassuming on the table provokes them finally to speech. At least, it provokes Fr. Cameron, who sees it, and smiles suddenly as a sunburst as he seizes upon his old teacup as if it were a former acquaintance.

'I'd not realised I'd missed this,' he says.

'Nor had I,' says Mia.

She has not yet lost look of a woman irradiated by deep-sprung happiness, and Persis tends to think this unlikely thing will never come to pass. She accepts a piece of the St Hilda's era china and decides that the clergy house suits Mia, that it will be more than worth the double wrench of losing her not only as a neighbour but an inhabitant of Silver Moon. Nestled into a sling across her mother's chest, Scilla thinks so too; her eyes are wide, the better to inhale the strange newness of the clergy house to her, and she pummels delighted hands against herm mother's shoulder to mark her approval. Carl says something to make Victor smile, and by the window Nina is humming a snatch of something that makes Fr. Cameron's eyes crinkle in delight. The china chatters on so many wafer-thin saucers and it is in laughter they sit down around the table, solidifying hopes, possibilities, and well-worn but lasting friendships.

* * *

'Nervous?'

'Only a little,' says Carl.

They are standing at the window looking out onto the road, watching for some sign to herald the arrival of the retired messenger dog. The Michaelmas term is now in full swing, the university bustling with gowned students who swarm the centre amassing books, and obscuring the pavement where they stop in spontaneous clusters to argue the virtues or otherwise of their lecturers and their ideas. The result of this mild-mannered chaos is that spotting with anything like accuracy the people accompanying the messenger dog presents unlooked for challenges.

'What will we do if Symp objects, as he almost certainly will?' Carl asks when another gowned don en route to college has been mistaken for their much-anticipated company.

Persis shifts Scilla in her arms and finds she has no answer. She thinks of Mia saying on that afternoon in March; _I do not know how to be any more_ and thinks she understands more than ever what she meant. There never used to be, Persis thinks, with another glance out the window, so many what ifs to contend with. Life was indeed simpler before the war.

'I expect we'll think of something,' she says.

Outside, Symp pauses in his mincing along the steps of the house, his back arched like some caricatured cat in the papers.

'Shall we join him, see what's caught his attention?' asks Persis.

'It's probably one of the undergraduates, streamers flapping as they fly between lectures,' says Carl, and while this is probable, even likely, they go outside all the same.

That is why they are standing out in front of the house when the former messenger dog and her people arrive. They have warned the Oxford Merediths to expect a certain amount of skittishness from her. In the event it is difficult to say who is more confused when the dog slips her collar –Carl or her handlers –and comes tearing towards Carl like a meteor. In any case the confusion only lasts a moment, because suddenly Carl is running to meet her, this supposedly nervous messenger dog, a great German Shepherd, who blazes white against the lowering grey of the sky and that might so easily be mistaken for an undersized wolf. They meet at the place where the pavement runs up against the stoop of the house, much barking on her side and laughter on Carl's. There is nothing skittish in this dog; she is eager, joyful, excited certainly, but hardly nervous. Neither is Carl. His hands go round her neck and she pushes him playfully to the ground, sending leaves at dried catkins scattering.

No one hears the apology offered by the officials because Carl is laughing and saying, 'Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, oh Lucy-for-light, they never said it was _you_. If I'd known you'd have come to me first, I'd have told them to send you. I've missed you so. Oh Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.'

He scratches her ears as he speaks, fingers tangled in the whirls of her fur; Lucy has her paws on his chest, pink tongue very much in evidence as she washes Carl's face, _exultate iubilate_ in the parlance of a dog.

In the doorway, Symp rubs his head against Persis's ankles and climbs her knees, purring for reassurance; _you at least, are mine_.

'Come on,' says Persis to the cat, nudging him in the direction of the door, 'we'll let them catch up. We'll be waiting when we're needed.'

Lucy's handlers linger uncertainly a minute longer, before deciding any information they might communicate to be superfluous and vanishing into the swirl of North Oxford traffic.

When at length man and dog have had their fill of reunion Carl scrabbles upright, pushing Lucy with him. He stands clumsily and with a last pat for Lucy, gathers the scruff of her neck in his hand.

'Come on,' he says, turning her towards the door, 'there are people I want you to meet,' and so saying, he opens the door of Silver Moon and beckons her in.

 _Fin._


End file.
